The White Bear
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.
Henrik Pontoppidan, the Danish Nobel laureate, is admired for the concentrated force of his novellas as much as for long, populous, world-encompassing novels like A Fortunate Man, and here are two of those novellas, newly and brilliantly translated by Paul Larkin.
The White Bear follows the fate of the odd, gangly, red-bearded Thorkild Müller. Born in rural Jutland and destined for the ministry, Thorkild proves to be a poor student and is assigned to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland. There, with his mythic-looking staff and dogskin skullcap, he becomes known as the White Bear—a beloved legend among the locals and a freewheeling embarrassment to his fellow priests. Grown old, he returns to Denmark, where again his flock adores him while his fellow men of cloth try to tame the "whirling dervish in their midst." In the end Thorkild mysteriously disappears, presumably back to the snow wilderness of Greenland.
The Rearguard, on the other hand, is a marriage story. Newlyweds Jørgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jørgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism; Ursula comes from a conservative, upper-middle-class family. At first, as they start their married life in Rome, they each try to change the other's worldview with arguments and threats, but as time wears on and they wear each other down, it becomes clear there can be no reconciliation. It is a tragic tale of art and idealism, individuality and love.
This translation was funded in part by a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comprising two novellas from Nobel winner Pontoppidan (Lucky Per), who died in 1943, this volume offers a vivid and comedic view of late 19th-century Denmark. In "The White Bear," Lutheran priest Thorkild Müller embarks on a mission to Christianize the Indigenous people of Greenland, where he quickly becomes more interested in learning to hunt caribou than evangelizing and is adopted into the fabric of Inuit society. He marries Seqineq, an Inuit woman, but after she dies, he impulsively requests to be transferred back to Denmark, where he's now at odds with the church. His popularity with his new parish sets off a battle of wills between him and the local bishop who wants to drive him out. "The Rearguard" likewise depicts a conflict of belief: it begins with firebrand Socialist realist painter Jørgen Hallager marrying Ursula Branth, the daughter of a conservative politician. On their honeymoon in Rome, they attempt—with little success—to reconcile their diverging views on propriety, poverty, and family ties. Pontoppidan's humanism and belief in the value of compromise permeate his portrayal of the couple's doomed marriage and Hallager's tragically unwavering views. These tales of universal struggles teem with keen insights.
