Lucky Per

Per Sidenius flees his father's suffocating Jutland parsonage for Copenhagen carrying an engineer's grand, half-formed plan to harness the west coast's wind and water into a network of canals that will drag Denmark into industrial modernity, and Pontoppidan uses the scheme's technical detail, real enough to be taken seriously by the capital's engineers, to make Per's ambition legible as more than youthful bravado. The novel's title is pointed irony from the start: 'lucky' Per succeeds at exactly the things Danish society is set up to reward, and Pontoppidan spends six hundred pages asking whether that success was worth wanting.

Per's engagement to Jakobe Salomon, daughter of a wealthy, intellectually formidable Jewish Copenhagen family, offers him a marriage of genuine equals, Jakobe reads and argues with him as a partner rather than a helpmate, and represents everything modern, cosmopolitan Denmark could become if it let go of the provincial pieties Per thinks he's already escaped. That the engagement fails is the novel's real turning point, not because Per finds someone he loves more, but because some current in him keeps pulling back toward the renunciation his father's faith trained into him long before he had words for it.

Pontoppidan wrote Lucky Per as the central panel of a trilogy auditing Denmark's 'Modern Breakthrough,' and Per's arc runs the bildungsroman backward on purpose: rather than a young man finding his place in the world through struggle, Per finds it by methodically giving every worldly gain back, fortune, fiancée, professional standing, until what's left looks less like defeat than like a life finally stripped down to what he actually wanted.

Jakobe is one of Danish literature's most fully realized intellectual heroines, a woman whose objections to Per's drift back toward renunciation are argued rather than simply felt, and Pontoppidan lets her walk away from him with her dignity and her convictions completely intact, marrying eventually and building a full, independent life he never manages to disturb. Thomas Mann admired the novel partly for this refusal to let Jakobe become collateral damage in Per's private reckoning with his father's God; she's the one major character the book allows to simply be right.