Pontoppidan's Lykke-Per - the views people published in books were rarely meant to frighten or provoke real thought

The Happiest People in the World, the Danes, had a terrible idea in 2004.  They assembled committees and created an official Danish Culture Canon, with each art represented by, for some mystical reason, exactly twelve works.  One of the canonical books is Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke-Per (1898-1904), a major novel by a Nobel Prize-winner that for some reason never made it into English until 2010, and was again translated in 2018, so now we have two of them.  Odd.  Bille August made a film version, that’s the reason for the duplication.

I read the British-English – or Irish-English – version titled A Fortunate Man, translated by Paul Larkin, while the American-English title is Lucky Per.  Both titles hide an ambiguity.  In Danish as in German, “lucky” can also mean “happy.”  Our hero Per is certainly lucky sometimes, but is he happy?  That’s the 700-page question.

Unluckily for me, Lykke-Per is a Novel of Ideas, and I am bad with those.  It is a Bildungsroman in which the hero works through a series of competing philosophies or at least stances towards life.  My impression is that Pontoppidan would like readers to engage seriously and thoughtfully with these competing ideas, reaching a synthesis, a conclusion.

Books could be a great diversion.  But the views people published in books were rarely meant to frighten or provoke real thought.  (Ch. 25)

But not this one.  Luckily for me, Lykke-Per is a Novel of Ideas, presenting a useful and necessary challenge to my usual standards.

The ethos of the novel is resolutely atheist and anti-Christian in the Nietzschean sense.  The novel is structured like a parabola, with some parallel scenes on each side of the arc, and a peak, or a pit, depending on which way you think the parabola is going, which includes a hilarious culminating moment of extreme Zarathustrianness and a sojourn in Rome.  Lykke-Per is a real descendant of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), so it is will be no surprise to readers of Wuthering Expectations that the center of the novel is in Rome.  Experienced readers of Goethe et. al. will also guess where the story ends up.

Per’s story, the hero’s story, that is.  Many others are right now busily reading Lucky Per because Dorian Stuber suggested a readalong.  He was intrigued by the novel’s depiction of Jewish life in Copenhagen, and particularly the Jewish heroine, Jakobe.  She is an unusual creation, perhaps even something new in fiction, and her story goes in some directions that I don’t remember seeing in earlier fiction.  Per’s story has some resemblance to, oh, the city-conquering Rastignac in Père Goriot or the willful Julien Sorel in Red and Black, as well as the protagonists of earlier Bildungsroman like Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry.  But Jakobe’s story is something else, something not found in Daniel Deronda or Sholem Aleichem.

Lykke-Per was originally published in eight volumes from 1898 to 1904.  It is really as much a roman fleuve as a Bildungsroman.  I have dropped in some of the original covers, borrowed from a superb Danish Pontoppidan site, which has the searchable texts we will all need as we work on the novel together.  We live in an age of miracles.  One of the covers, the one that could almost show Rastignac at the end of Père Goriot, is from a 1959 edition.  The one with the moon is from the 1903 seventh volume, Lykke-Per, his Journey to America.  Per never goes to America!  That title is ironic.

For the rest of the week, I guess I will get to work on this novel.