Den allvarsamma Leken

You can love me in a pagan way.

Two young people, Arvid and Lydia, meet and fall in love. There are no immediate hurdles to their love. That should be it, right, just coast to the happy ending? Except things don't just "happen". (I have a feeling Söderberg would have agreed with John Lennon about life being what happens to you while you're busy making plans.) A few hesitations, a few clumsy words, and they're on different paths, reconnecting and rekindling and resplitting several times over the next 15-odd years, while the world continues around them. They both want to be free, they both want to be together, but as fate would have it, those two things are never possible at the same time.

They talk about mountain landscapes - it should be called valley landscapes. You live and work in the valley, not on the peaks.

I haven't read this since high school, and I'm struck again by how thoroughly modern Söderberg feels in almost all respects. It's a novel from 1912 (the free ebook version is pre- grammar and spelling reform, at that) in which people have casual (and not-so-casual) sex, swear and generally act in their own best interest, set to a clear-eyed, mildly ironic prose where Söderberg doesn't so much gladly dismantle the old society that's about to become something different as pass it by with cold disdain; while it's set during a time when both revolution and war was in the air, Söderberg remains coolly above such things as politics and just focuses on his two fuckups as they dance around each other, trying to figure out what's keeping them apart or together.

It's weird how it even feels more timeless than both adaptations I've taken in - Sundström's 1960s-set rewrite For Lydia and Pernilla August's 2016 film. Those feel like period pieces (an unsuccessful one in August's case) while the original, details and a few plot elements (the casual dismissal of children, for instance) aside, feels far more relatable. not because Söderberg doesn't allude to then-current events - he most definitely does, that's part of the point of having a novel take place over 15 years - or because things haven't changed (especially for women) in 107 years, but because the things he does dwell on remain mostly the same. (OK, apart from the obsession with what Carl Snoilsky would have thought.) (Though it also probably helps that 1910 is more safely in The Past than a story set when my own parents were dating.)

Where August rushes through the plot, Söderberg lets them evolve (or not) seperately, until it's already too late. Where Sundström rightfully calls both Arvid, Söderberg and society on their insidious rather than overt sexist bullshit, and probably writes a more likable story, Söderberg lets his two characters be both part of the world and isolated from it, creating tension from their inability (or well, chiefly Arvid's) to find and accept each other at the same level. Cool and collected on the outside, messed up as hell on the inside.

You don't choose your destiny. And you no more choose your wife or your mistress or your children. You get them, and you have them, and occasionally you lose them. But you do not choose!