The Serious Game

The Serious Game is a 1912 novel by Hjalmar Söderberg. It tells the story of a man and a woman who fall in love when young, and remain in love, but stay separated and marry others. Three Swedish films based on the book have been produced: Den allvarsamma leken (1945), Games of Love and Loneliness (1977) and A Serious Game (2016). Synopsis Sweden at the turn of the previous century. Arvid, an ambitious and well-educated young man, meets Lydia, the daughter of a landscape painter, during an idyllic summer vacation and falls in love. Lydia, however, has other suitors, and Arvid is frightened of being tied down by his emotions. Trapped inside marriages of convenience, they struggle in later years to rekindle the promise of their romance with bitter and tragic results. Background The novel was inspired by Maria von Platen, a woman that Söderberg had a love affair with some years earlier. He first used the subject in the play Gertrud in 1906. In 1908 he began writing a novel on the subject, but it was unfinished. Söderberg eventually picked up the subject again in 1912, and the novel was written in summer and autumn 1912 and published in November.