His spectacles reflected only my window, its curtains and my rubber plant

Michael Hofmann

• Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by Paul Britten Austin
  Harvill, 143 pp, £10.00, November 2002, ISBN 1 84343 009 6
• The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by Eva Claeson
  Marion Boyars, 239 pp, £8.99, September 2001, ISBN 0 7145 3061 1

None for forty years, then two in 14 months. Not London buses, but English translations – in this instance, of books by the Swedish novelist Hjalmar Söderberg (1869-1941). The Serious Game would appear to be a translation of a novel that was first published in Swedish in 1912 and has not previously appeared in English; Doctor Glas is a reissue of a 1963 version of the 1905 original, with the addition of an admiring preface by Margaret Atwood. A play, Gertrud, was filmed by Carl Dreyer; Doctor Glas has also been filmed; I don’t quite understand why these books and others of his – Martin Birck’s Youth, from 1901, and castigated, on its appearance, for being ‘pornographic’ – haven’t been a continuous part of our literary landscape. But perhaps the requisite mixture of courtesy and curiosity no longer exists? Paul Binding’s Babel Guide to Scandinavian Fiction in Translation describes Söderberg as ‘one of the very greatest Swedish writers, disgracefully little known in the English-speaking world’. The second part of the sentence seems almost to follow from the first.