Hjalmar Söderberg
1869–1941
Biography
Hjalmar Söderberg was a Swedish novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist, born in Stockholm in 1869. He began his career at the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet at the age of twenty, and his first novel followed six years later. He is regarded as one of the great writers in Swedish literature, and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages. He died in 1941.
His first novel, Förvillelser (Delusions, 1895), follows a young dandy who drifts aimlessly through the capital, squandering money and love. Its dark but thoughtful tone became typical of much of Söderberg's later output, which offers a rich picture of contemporary Stockholm seen through the eyes of a detached observer, the flâneur. He followed it with the short-story collection Historietter (1898) and the novel Martin Birck's Youth (1901), which traces the growth of a young amateur poet.
Förvillelser, the book on this site, is the starting point of his long career as a novelist, and it shows qualities that run through his work: a melancholy, reflective manner and a sharp eye for the city. Doctor Glas (1905), which some critics regard as his masterpiece, shows the same psychological precision in a darker register. Readers who come to Söderberg through the first novel can see how early he found his voice.
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Books
Förvillelser
by Hjalmar Söderberg
Tomas Weber, a medical student in Stockholm in the 1890s, drifts between a respectable girl and a pretty shop assistant, and between the money he owes and the money he wants. Hjalmar Söderberg's first novel is a cool, ironic portrait of a young man's wanderings in love and…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.