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A Fortunate Man

A Fortunate Man

by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated from the Danish by Paul Larkin, afterword by Flemming Behrendt

$29.95
$29.95
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A Fortunate Man tells the story of Per Sidenius, a Lutheran pastor's son who revolts against his family and flees the backwaters of Jutland for Copenhagen. Per is handsome, ambitious, and hungry for the technological future of the twentieth century. He studies engineering and draws up plans for a new port and new canals, for harnessing wind and wave energy to transform Denmark into a commercial giant. Fully persuaded of his own genius, Per first repels and then attracts Jakobe Salomon, a young Jewish woman whose family is eager to underwrite his plans. They fall in love and get engaged; gradually Jakobe opens Per's eyes to the wider world. Meanwhile, he also falls under the spell of Dr. Nathan, a popular philosopher who rails against the conservative powers that be. But ultimately these powers win out, Per's relationship with Jakobe founders, and he goes home to Jutland and marries a pastor's daughter. Though fortunate, he is never happy.

One of the last great nineteenth-century novels and Henrik Pontoppidan's masterpiece, A Fortunate Man anatomizes and skewers Danish society, from the small towns to the metropolis. Paul Larkin's dazzing translation brings out the wide range and full force of a novel admired by Georg Lukács and praised by Ernst Bloch as "one of the foundational texts of world literature."

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379272
Pages: 880
Publication Date:

Praise

[Pontoppidan] is a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers.
—Thomas Mann

A Fortunate Man breathes the excited, tempestuous air of its time, but it often feels strikingly modern. What is Per if not an ancestor of the Silicon Valley positivists of our time? His zealous belief in man’s ability to master nature is hardly distinct from the conviction, common enough among tech gurus today, that mortality is a disease with a cure like any other....A Fortunate Man is often intensely atheistic, and testifies to the oppressive influence of Christian fundamentalism on Danish society. Pontoppidan read Nietzsche while at work on the novel and was surely inspired by the German philosopher’s assault both on Christianity and the cult of rationalism.
—Morten Høi Jensen, The New York Review of Books

Heavy, God-infested, magnificently metaphysical, unafraid to court ridicule, and playing for the highest possible stakes.
—James Wood

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