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A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan
£27.00
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781681379272
Published:
10 Jun 2025
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
768 pages
Dimensions:
203x127mm
Weight:
0.367kgs
Author:
A Nobel Prize-winner's unforgettable novel about a man who sheds the stifling country life of his childhood for the excitement of Copenhagen.
A Nobel Prize-winner's unforgettable novel about a man who sheds the stifling country life of his childhood for the excitement of Copenhagen.
This masterpiece of Danish literature, admired by the likes of Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, is now available in a new English translation.
A Fortunate Man follows the life of Per Sidenius, the ambitious son of a Lutheran minister who revolts against the stifling religiosity of his family and flees the Danish countryside for the sights and sounds of bustling Copenhagen. Believing the coming twentieth century will be an age of science and industry, Per dreams of completing a large-scale civil engineering project that could transform Denmark into a commercial and industrial giant.
When Per gets engaged to Jakobe Salomon, whose wealthy Jewish family is eager to sponsor his project, his personal and professional happiness seem all but guaranteed. With her strong will and keen intellect, Jakobe profoundly changes Per's view of himself and the world, and is without a doubt one of the most brilliant and compelling heroines in the history of literature. But despite his good fortune, Per's life is still marred by a persistent unhappiness, and Per must question the very foundations of his being-his identity and his purpose in the world.
At once a vivid portrait of Danish national identity and a powerful exploration of choice and chance within a human life, A Fortunate Man is one of the greatest accomplishments of Nobel Prize-winning writer Henrik Pontoppidan. Paul Larkin's dazzling translation brings out as never before Pontoppidan's fluid and muscular prose, and makes available to American readers for the first time a novel admired by Georg Lukács and praised by Ernst Bloch as "one of the foundational texts of world literature."
About the Author: Henrik Pontopiddan (1857-1943) was a Danish realist writer and influential member of the Modern Break-Through whose novels offer comprehensive portraits of Denmark at the turn of the twentieth century and articulate broad social critiques. Born in Fredericia, Denmark, into a lineage of affluent religious officials, he nonetheless espoused firmly liberal, progressive positions throughout his life and work, writing attentively about the Danish peasantry and proletariat, with whom he lived and maintained close contact. Two of his short pieces, Messias and Den gamle Adam, earned him severe censure for supposed blasphemy; shortly after the controversy, the publisher of Messias, Ernst Brandes, committed suicide. His main works are often compared to those of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola and constitute part of a major realist oeuvre which earned him the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature. Paul Larkin is an award-winning filmmaker, translator, critic and novelist from Manchester, UK. He worked for five years in the Danish Merchant Navy before taking a degree in Scandinavian and Celtic Studies. He later trained as a television producer and director with the BBC. He had a long career in journalism and film before returning professionally to Scandinavian languages and fiction.
| Number of pages | 768 |
|---|
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