Shyness and dignity

Elias is a middle-aged educator at odds with a world where he everything he loves is increasingly irrelevant and he himself, losing that hopeful power of youth, finds himself lost and indifferent. This book just hit too close to home for me. I am even now depressed that I connected with so many of the passages. Such a dark, existential and Scandinavian- flavoured crisis as the one faced by this lonely protagonist is not one I wish to embroil myself in but damn. It is absolutely wrought with that quiet despair despite everything being... just fine. What the title Shyness and Dignity is really playing around with is Loneliness and Social Awkwardness, but in calling it Shyness and Dignity we can get a lot more questions- for example, is Elias shy because he is insecure or because he is protecting his dignity? Does he feel his dignity is under assault because the world does not value Ibsen and Thomas Mann as much as he does? What should this guy be doing instead of brooding over his aquavit? Could he make his subject relevant to a new generation, or are they a lost cause?
I got the sense that if you want to feel relevant, you have to constantly adopt the new, but how can an aging person do so without giving up some shyness and dignity?
I like the we are also given some insight into how are protagonist ends up smashing an umbrella one fine rainy day.
The ending is abrupt. I was shocked to find myself on the last page, nary a paragraph remaining, learning that the the whole short book was our guy on a walk, considering the past, as we find out what led to the smashing of the umbrella. The day after the umbrella is smashed we are told that things will not be the same. The details are left to the reader.
By far the most interesting character is his wife, the beautiful Eva Linde. Her beauty, body and manners are the primary focus of her character sketch, which annoyed me. Dag gone old men trying to write about women, heavy sigh. She truly is an object in the book, a mirror for Elias, so maybe this doesn't matter as she is outside of the main action.
We understand that he married her because of her beauty, availability and contrastingly, her indifference that gives her a statuesque pose throughout the novel. Elias makes some outlandish assumptions about her motivations, and I did not like that. He assumes she quits her job as a secretary to find more meaningful work because her beauty is fading. He resents and pities her for losing her beauty as she ages. He does not understand why she does not say that she loves him but accepts this marriage because he is proud to have a hot wife.
Eva, first married to Elias's charming best friend Jonah Corneliusson, likes to sit on a couch looking hot while the men talk, seemingly content to just be beautiful. She sleeps a lot too. Probably because she is terribly bored. When she shakes off the shackles of her beauty by getting fatter and middle aged, he is repelled, but also stubbornly hold some love for her. It is a perplexing relationship.
This book lends itself to a deep analysis, even essays. It is by turns fantastically insightful, then it wanes humorless and dreary, so that we get to share this poor man's depression, maybe even relate to it, or more sensibly, steer clear of the sort of introversion and brooding that rains on poor Elias.