![Lucky Per (1904) has long been revered in its homeland as "the great Danish novel." Henrik Pontoppidan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1917 and hailed by Thomas Mann as "a full-blooded storyteller." His masterpiece is an epic portrayal of social and cultural change that feels surprisingly modern more than a century after its writing.
Pontoppidan provides a panoramic view of the contradictions of the modernizing world through the portrait of a single driven and beleaguered soul. Per Sidenius, unhappy son of an austere clergyman, rejects his faith and flees the Danish countryside for the capital city . Gifted and ambitious, he arrives in Copenhagen believing "you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast...[and] capture and bind it." Per's obsession is a grandiose engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark's landscape and its minor position in the world. While working relentlessly to achieve this inflated vision of personal and national destiny, he pursues the fiercely independent heiress Jakobe Salomon, the most appealing character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines in European literature. Though Per's ambitions come to grief along the way at its heart his story turns on his belated understanding of the true relationship between "luck" and "happiness" (the Danish word in the title contains both meanings). In its expansive richness and its humane depths, Lucky Per is a triumph of world literature.
Translated from the Danish by Naomi Lebowitz
Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/1227/1968/LuckyPer__35307.1668716752.jpg?c=2 "Lucky Per (1904) has long been revered in its homeland as \"the great Danish novel.\" Henrik Pontoppidan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1917 and hailed by Thomas Mann as \"a full-blooded storyteller.\" His masterpiece is an epic portrayal of social and cultural change that feels surprisingly modern more than a century after its writing.
Pontoppidan provides a panoramic view of the contradictions of the modernizing world through the portrait of a single driven and beleaguered soul. Per Sidenius, unhappy son of an austere clergyman, rejects his faith and flees the Danish countryside for the capital city . Gifted and ambitious, he arrives in Copenhagen believing \"you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast...[and] capture and bind it.\" Per's obsession is a grandiose engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark's landscape and its minor position in the world. While working relentlessly to achieve this inflated vision of personal and national destiny, he pursues the fiercely independent heiress Jakobe Salomon, the most appealing character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines in European literature. Though Per's ambitions come to grief along the way at its heart his story turns on his belated understanding of the true relationship between \"luck\" and \"happiness\" (the Danish word in the title contains both meanings). In its expansive richness and its humane depths, Lucky Per is a triumph of world literature.
Translated from the Danish by Naomi Lebowitz
Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg")
Lucky Per (1904) has long been revered in its homeland as "the great Danish novel." Henrik Pontoppidan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1917 and hailed by Thomas Mann as "a full-blooded storyteller." His masterpiece is an epic portrayal of social and cultural change that feels surprisingly modern more than a century after its writing.
Pontoppidan provides a panoramic view of the contradictions of the modernizing world through the portrait of a single driven and beleaguered soul. Per Sidenius, unhappy son of an austere clergyman, rejects his faith and flees the Danish countryside for the capital city . Gifted and ambitious, he arrives in Copenhagen believing "you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast...[and] capture and bind it." Per's obsession is a grandiose engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark's landscape and its minor position in the world. While working relentlessly to achieve this inflated vision of personal and national destiny, he pursues the fiercely independent heiress Jakobe Salomon, the most appealing character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines in European literature. Though Per's ambitions come to grief along the way at its heart his story turns on his belated understanding of the true relationship between "luck" and "happiness" (the Danish word in the title contains both meanings). In its expansive richness and its humane depths, Lucky Per is a triumph of world literature.
Translated from the Danish by Naomi Lebowitz
Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg
Editorial Reviews
"This sprawling saga of one Dane’s life also succeeds as an epochal portrait of noisy, pluralistic, turn-of-the-20th-century Europe." --Publishers Weekly
“[Pontoppidan is] a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers . . . He judges the times and then, as a true poet, points us towards a purer, more honorable way of being human.” —Thomas Mann
“What startled its contemporaries about this strange novel was . . . the sense of something new, one of those as yet unnamed and perhaps unnameable psychic discoveries for which the novelists of the period—from Dostoevsky to James—desperately searched . . . This turns out to have been the novel’s project . . . to modify our sense of what luck or happiness means.” —Fredric Jameson, London Review of Books
“Henrik Pontoppidan rules over the province of Danish letters with a grey-bearded authority akin to Leo Tolstoy’s or Henry James’s . . . [Lucky Per is] one of the great novels about modernity . . . [It] breathes the excited, tempestuous air of its time, but it often feels strikingly modern.” —The New York Review of Books
“This novel, with its relentless probing for what lies beyond our blind spots, will leave standing no final protection from the human truth: not class, not learning, not ideology, and in these moments when a character grows strong enough to drop her blinders and simply see, as the novelist sees, Lucky Per becomes not just great, but prophetic.” —from the Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg
About the Author
Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) was a Danish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for "his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark." The son of a rural minister, he moved to Copenhagen as a young man and eventually earned his living as a journalist and writer. He is best known for the sweeping social novels he wrote between 1890 and the 1920s, which "reflect the social, religious, and political struggles of the time."
