A Fortunate Man

”[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

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

“A Fortunate Man breates 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?” —Morten Høi Jensen, The New York Review of Books

“Nothing is hurried in this long, lavishly imagined book. At each point Pontoppidan builds up the context, evoking landscape and cityscape, dramatizing not only the lives of his characters but the busy world around them. Soon it becomes clear that nothing can be understood on its own; every impulse and exchange is intimately connected to, if not predetermined by, a thousand others … What is recognisable is the high seriousness of the endeavour and the belief that with a huge effort of the imagination, combined with the acute observation of a wide range of human behaviour, the novel could be used to bring readers to some ultimate wisdom.” —Tim Parks, London Review of Books

“[This] overlooked nineteenth-century masterpiece, which rivals the achievement of giants like Tolstoy and Mann … is at once a chronicle of turn-of-the-century Denmark as the agrarian society industrialized, as well as a keen psychological portrait of an individual during times of great cultural and technological upheaval.” —Christopher Urban, Commonweal

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) was one of Denmark’s great realist writers, a member of the Modern Breakthrough movement whose works are often compared to those of Honore de Balzac and mile Zola. The son of a clergyman, he studied engineering in Copenhagen but then left to become a teacher and writer. For his numerous novels and short stories, he won the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paul Larkin is a journalist, filmmaker, critic, and translator from the Danish and other Scandinavian languages. In 1997 The Gap in the Mountain… Our Journey into Europe, the six-part film series he wrote and directed as an independent production for RT , won him the European Journalist of the Year Award (the overall award and the film director category). In 2008, he was awarded the Best International Director prize at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival for his Irish-language docudrama Imeacht na nIarlai (The Flight of the Earls) starring Stephen Rea. He lives in a Gaeltacht area of County Donegal, Ireland, where Irish is the predominant language of everyday use.

Flemming Behrendt is a Danish journalist and literary critic who has written extensively about the work of Henrik Pontoppidan.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.