Lucky Per written at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century (1898-1904) has
never before been translated into English although its author Henrik Pontoppidan won the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1917 together with his Danish countryman Karl Adolph Gjellerup.
Indeed Pontoppidan's novel was singled out by writers like Thomas Mann and Georg Lucács as
seminal in modern world literature. Lucky Per sweeps through every social religious literary
and philosophical circle of the 1890s through the politics of city power brokers the
engineering of new technology the alien correctives of provincial complacency by the
ecumenical culture and complex of Copenhagen's Jewish set the victims of the Russian pogroms
and the cosmopolitan chastisement imported from the European capitals by the self-exiled Georg
Brandes Danish critic of huge influence and presence and a character in the novel. The
contrast between the Danish capital and provinces is matched by that between Copenhagen and
Berlin. The Austrian Alps are host to a clash between a form of progressive post-Darwinian
naturalism and conservative Christianity whereas Italy mediates between comparative morality
and the classical and contemporary worlds. Pontoppidan dramatically incorporates the
perspectives of the makers of early modernism such as Brandes Kierkegaard Nietzsche Ibsen
biblical prophets and Bohemian artists. Trolls from Scandinavian fairy tales haunt the novel's
realism without ever letting them bully or appropriate either the life of the fiction or the
life of the protagonist from his childhood as the son of a strict Lutheran pastor through the
passionate sorrows and joys that led him to his full maturity. It is a rich and riveting work
of moral metaphysical psychological philosophical and literary complexity and depth
carried by a large varied vivid and vibrant cast of characters of all classes and
persuasions.
