Lucky Per (Everyman's Library Classics)

Description

Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark s capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast ... and capture and bind it . He falls in with Copenhagen s Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature.
Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark s landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of luck to happiness (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.

About the Author

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857–1943) was a Danish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark . The son of a rural minister, he moved to Copenhagen as a young man and eventually earned his living as a journalist and writer. He is best known for the sweeping social novels he wrote between 1890 and the 1920s, which reflect the social, religious and political struggles of the time.

Garth Risk Hallberg’s first novel, City on Fire, was an international bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Independent, and Vogue, among others. His illustrated novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family was nominated for a Believer Book Award and his short fiction and essays have been published in the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review. He is a Granta Best Young American Novelist. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children and is at work on a new novel.

Naomi Lebowitz is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St Louis and the author of books on Ibsen, Kierkegaard and Svevo.