Lucky Per

Praise

“This sprawling saga of one Dane’s life also succeeds as an epochal portrait of noisy, pluralistic, turn-of-the-20th-century Europe.” –-Publishers Weekly

“[Pontoppidan is] a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers . . . He judges the times and then, as a true poet, points us towards a purer, more honorable way of being human.” —Thomas Mann
 
“What startled its contemporaries about this strange novel was . . . the sense of something new, one of those as yet unnamed and perhaps unnameable psychic discoveries for which the novelists of the period—from Dostoevsky to James—desperately searched . . . This turns out to have been the novel’s project . . . to modify our sense of what luck or happiness means.” 
—Fredric Jameson, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
 
“Henrik Pontoppidan rules over the province of Danish letters with a grey-bearded authority akin to Leo Tolstoy’s or Henry James’s . . . [LUCKY PER is] one of the great novels about modernity . . . [It] breathes the excited, tempestuous air of its time, but it often feels strikingly modern.” —THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
 
“This novel, with its relentless probing for what lies beyond our blind spots, will leave standing no final protection from the human truth: not class, not learning, not ideology, and in these moments when a character grows strong enough to drop her blinders and simply see, as the novelist sees, Lucky Per becomes not just great, but prophetic.” —from the Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg