A Fortnight Before the Frost

On his fortieth birthday, celebrated by a solitary meal in Oslo's most exclusive hotel, Dr. Knut Holmen, a successful middle-aged ear, nose, and throat specialist, decides to go on holiday in the past to take stock of himself and his values. As echoes from his childhood and youth emerge, the edifice of self-satisfied bourgeois respectability he has painstakingly constructed, slowly crumbles. Searching for clues to his malaise as he revisits the neighborhoods he knew as a peasant student in the capital, he finds that, from early on, his life has been dominated by a repressive sexual morality. After a series of dramatic encounters and much self-probing analysis, he achieves a catharsis of sexual guilt and can look forward to a new beginning.