Lucky Per
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- $1,199.00
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- $1,199.00
Descripción editorial
‘Lucky Per,’ written at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century (1898-1904), has never before been translated into English, although its author, Henrik Pontoppidan, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1917 together with his Danish countryman Karl Adolph Gjellerup. Indeed, Pontoppidan's novel was singled out by writers like Thomas Mann and Georg Lucács as seminal in modern world literature. ‘Lucky Per’ sweeps through every social, religious, literary, and philosophical circle of the 1890s, through the politics of city power brokers, the engineering of new technology, the alien correctives of provincial complacency by the ecumenical culture and complex of Copenhagen's Jewish set, the victims of the Russian pogroms, and the cosmopolitan chastisement imported from the European capitals by the self-exiled Georg Brandes, Danish critic of huge influence and presence, and a character in the novel. The contrast between the Danish capital and provinces is matched by that between Copenhagen and Berlin. The Austrian Alps are host to a clash between a form of progressive post-Darwinian naturalism and conservative Christianity, whereas Italy mediates between comparative morality and the classical and contemporary worlds. Pontoppidan dramatically incorporates the perspectives of the makers of early modernism, such as Brandes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ibsen, biblical prophets, and Bohemian artists. Trolls from Scandinavian fairy tales haunt the novel's realism without ever letting them bully or appropriate either the life of the fiction or the life of the protagonist from his childhood as the son of a strict Lutheran pastor through the passionate sorrows and joys that led him to his full maturity. It is a rich and riveting work of moral, metaphysical, psychological, philosophical, and literary complexity and depth, carried by a large, varied, vivid, and vibrant cast of characters of all classes and persuasions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vast bildungsroman from 1917 the Nobel Prize winner Pontoppidan (1857 1943) offers a panorama of early 20th-century Danish society in the throes of social and industrial change. A classic in Denmark, the novel flings its hero, Per Sidenius, into one moral crisis after another. The son of a provincial clergyman, Per flees his family to pursue his dream of becoming an engineer. Penniless in Copenhagen, the vain and restless young student encounters poets, politicians, and men of the cloth who represent the conflicting philosophies of Pontoppidan's day. Per's grand ambition is to build a massive harbor project that will bring Denmark into the modern age, and he arrogantly schemes to achieve his goals, breaking hearts at every turn. In need of patronage, he falls in with a remarkable Jewish family, whose enlightened daughter, Jakobe, becomes his fianc e for a time. Per is of many minds, however, and his life eventually spirals out of the metropolis into the countryside. His character proves finally to be too small a vessel in which to pour the era's myriad ideas, and it is Jakobe one of the most vibrant and complex female characters found in the literature of the era with whom the author imbues the most noble of them. This sprawling saga of one Dane's life also succeeds as an epochal portrait of noisy, pluralistic, turn-of-the-20th-century Europe.
