A Fortunate Man

by Henrik Pontoppidan, Paul Larkin (Translator)

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681379289
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	768

About the Author

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 Honoré de Balzac and Émile 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 an Irish writer, translator, and critic. He worked for five years in the Danish Merchant Navy before taking a degree in Scandinavian and Celtic Studies. He later trained as a film director with the BBC and had a long career in journalism and film. He lives in the Gaeltacht area of County Donegal, Ireland, where Irish is the predominant language.

Editorial Reviews

"More than a century after its initial publication, A Fortunate Man skillfully and unsentimentally addresses the central concerns of modern life—tradition vs innovation, the individual vs community, religion vs secularism, self-indulgence vs self-denial. . . . Pontoppidan's genius, in capturing not only a crucial moment in Danish history but also a watershed in the development of the modern individual, deserves much more attention than it has previously received in the English-speaking world. With any luck, Paul Larkin's eminently readable translation will bring him that visibility."

Times Literary Supplement

"The author of A Fortunate Man is a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely he ranks within the highest class of European writers. . . . With that charming, indeed gripping, stringency which is the secret to art, he judges his time and, as a true poet, points to a purer humanity."

Thomas Mann

"A novel for our time. . . . Pontoppidan’s novelistic lesson about the perilous road to selfhood in a world of our own making could not be more timely. . . . Not only does Pontoppidan’s verbal orchestration deal with authority on the cusp of an existential and national breakthrough that verges on a breakdown; it also offers up an array of painstakingly nuanced individual portrayals and revelations. Alongside this it unfolds, in telling detail, a host of theological and philosophical, political and aesthetic, scientific and technological bones of contention of the kind that defined the cultural and societal scene in Denmark and countries south of its border during the ground-shifting transition from a world of hegemonic national spirituality to one of global innovation and market economic expansion—all turning individual souls more optimistic and more lost than most people realized or had words for."

Rain Taxi Review of Books

"An impressive, fluent achievement. It presents the first real opportunity for English-language readers to encounter what the scholar Flemming Behrendt, in his afterword, calls one of the most re-read and talked about novels in Danish literary history. . . . Pontoppidan is always of two minds about things, and it is for this reason that A Fortunate Man, while being one of the great novels about modernity, never once buckles under the weight of the ideas and currents it depicts. Pontoppidan is repeatedly drawn out into the abundance, the noisy pluralism of life, even as his hero travels deeper and deeper into the small privacy of his own being. The narrative’s spaciousness, Pontoppidan’s humane breadth and tolerance, remains deeply affecting throughout."

New York Review of Books