A Fortunate Man

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.”

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.