Review of The Serious Game (1912)

Hjalmar Söderberg (writer).

Read in 2026.

In the 1940s, Ingemar Wizelius described The Serious Game in its original language as “vår litteraturs enda betydande kärleksroman”, meaning the only significant romantic novel in Swedish literature. I am inclined to believe not only that Wizelius was right, but that he’s still right more than a hundred years after the novel was written.

There are signs of the novel being written in moderate haste, perhaps in its boozy, smoke-filled settings. Another critic, Fredrik Böök, dismissed it as a potpourri. Next to Söderberg’s other works, it is indeed remarkably long, chaotic, and referential. Böök himself appears in the novel under the name Löök—roughly “Ônion”—but this is not a true roman à clef. Söderberg does go to excess when he inserts himself into the plot as a rather unsympathetic character, reusing the alias of Henrik Rissler from Främlingarna (1903). Back then, the English phrase “all right” had just entered Swedish, but “Rissler” does sound like “Rizzler”, the nickname of momentary Internet celebrity Christian Joseph more than 110 years later. Söderberg was a funny guy, his wry sense of humour outliving the events of his own time surprisingly well.

The many references are justified. The main character, Arvid, becomes a journalist. More importantly, the flow of history around the two lovers is inseparable from Söderberg’s perspective on love. The novel, though it is intense and moving, is not a drama in the technical sense. In one scene, the main character gives his true love, Lydia, a rebound copy of The Iliad (ca. 700 BCE) and he reads from it to her, because their love story is technically an epic. It is not a story of violence or politics, nor is it governed by the historical events it references, but it is part of a quotidian chain of cause and effect that is beyond the control of the characters and extends to emotion. When Arvid becomes a journalist, it is because the regular music reviewer is out sick and the paper’s main editor has dinner plans that night, so Arvid goes to the opera. “Man väljer inte”, says one of Arvid’s friends: “One does not choose.”

Arvid really feels that he isn’t making enough money at the paper to support a family with the social status he wants for himself and for Lydia, and this is why he delays proposing to her. However, it would be a mistake to think that their love is unhappy because of some economic injustice against either of the two. They both belong to the bourgeoisie and could have chosen a more common economic status for love. It would also be a mistake to think that their love is unhappy because they doubt its nature, or because they are procrastinating cowards. Söderberg’s understanding of human nature is more advanced than that of Zola in Thérèse Raquin (1867), or Strindberg in Miss Julie (1888). In the novel, the realist Honoré de Balzac is dismissed as an incurable romantic.

One reason for the outcome is obvious. Arvid is sexist. From the very beginning, he is sexually experienced but anxious to make sure that Lydia is not. In the same way that they are not truly the victims of economic injustice, they are not victims of social circumstance in this regard. They are careful to arrange their extramarital affair in a time just before the automobile made it easy to get away from everyone you know, but prudish public morality in the myopic social circle of their class is not their downfall. There is a wonderful sequence where Arvid—an atheist—reads a couple of French textbooks on moral philosophy without religious basis. He laughs at them as bad philosophy, but he cannot do better. He is neither a good person nor larger than life in the mould of Aristotle’s Poetics (ca. 355 BCE). What finally breaks Arvid’s heart is similarity. Lydia and he are soulmates in the ironic sense that they are both gradually disillusioned by one another behaving in the same way, acting on the same drives, without full understanding or control but with realistic complexity and pain. It seems to me that Söderberg understands this process well enough to know that Arvid’s sexism is a delusion and one character flaw among many.

Söderberg outdoes Zola, Strindberg and Balzac in realism, but not only in realism. He is sometimes dismissed as an atheist provocateur and an urban idler, a flanör, but in this novel, the depth of his passion and empathy are on display, and you don’t have to read between the lines. Arvid reads a poem he wrote as a boy, “Jag gick på vägen med min moder”, and it is a vivid fantasy, more than worthy of the contemporary Lord Dunsany. Söderberg’s usual sensitive understatements are sometimes punctuated here by one character or another bursting out more bluntly, as you do. More than once, central love scenes are cast not quite as British capital-R Romanticism but as mono no aware channeled through the European motif of memento mori, including literal mourning for the dead symbolized by sextons tolling their bells. It is a sentimentality that works without compromising on the realism or the straightforward style of the writing.

The novel might have been better still if Lydia had stayed on as a focalizer, taking turns with Arvid to tell the story from her point of view as she does in the opening. Though she is a strong a character, she is also pretty and somewhat objectified, her modish eyelashes prefiguring the flapper of the 1920s. Aside from that detail, Söderberg does his best to compress into a chaotic plot of only 15 years a sense of the human condition without fate, superstition, or pat social Darwinism.

References here: Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time (2021).

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