Henrik Pontoppidan: Lykke-Per (Lucky Per)

The latest addition to my website isHenrik Pontoppidan‘s Lykke-Per (Lucky Per). This is a long and complex story of a Danish man called Per Sidenius. He is born and grows up in a large very religious family but soon breaks with them. He does not, like his brothers, want to be a parson but a civil engineer and goes to Copenhagen to study. He has grandiose ideas for a major project and drops out of his studies. He receives support from a rich Jewish family but his arrogance, assuming that without any training or experience he knows it all, means that his project does not go forward. He manages his love life as badly as his professional life and virtually ignores his family, even when they move to Copenhagen after the father’s death. He eventually has an epiphany and changes his ways, leaving someone else to develop and take the credit for his project, but, though he changes, his struggles with his demons do not work out well. Pontopiddan gives us an excellent portrait of a man who, as Pontopiddan says His pact with Luck he had been living by was a pact with the Devil, with Satan.

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