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Irish Examiner

Book review: Novellas of a Nobel prize winner translated for a whole new audience

The novels and short stories of Pontoppidan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917, reflect Danish political and cultural life from the perspective of social indignation and social realism. Yet they are leavened with brilliant satire and sarcasm to ridicule establishment hypocrisy. Such is the fluency of Larkin's translation and his use of familiar idiom that the two novellas here are refreshing and a joy to read. Pastor Thorkild Müller, a hopeless theology student, is sent to the Greenland colony to proselytise and preach. It's considered a lifelong exile for dunces. He is an unkempt, bearlike big man who has suffered much abuse and humiliation — but is not as slow-witted as he seems. The ice, the fjords, the harshness of lonely winter and the revitalising light of summer, help form the man, bring him closer to god but closer still to the indigenous Intuit people whose simplicity and harmony with nature draws him intimately into their culture. This is vivid writing, reminiscent of Knut Hamsun on landscape, and Halldór Laxness on the comedy of life. Müller goes native, marries, has children. It is many years later, after his wife dies, that he experiences the longing to go back to Denmark. There, his new parishioners are wary of the eccentric, uncouth, ill-dressed pastor who smells of fish, wandering the forests and hills, scaring the kids. But they come to love him and his down-to-earth spirituality. However, when he cancels tithes, a move which crosses the line, threatens order and his ecclesiastical superiors, the plot against him thickens and 'the white bear' has a choice to make. Rebellion of a different type is the theme of the second novella, The Rearguard, which is here translated into English for the first time. For someone who was never involved in organised politics (but sympathising with the worker and peasant), Pontoppidan perceptively portrays the dogmatism of Danish painter, 'Red Jørgen' Hallager, who rails against cosmopolitan, conventional art in favour of 'social realism', a principle he holds dear, at great cost to all around him, including his frail and loving wife, Ursula. However, while it is faintly possible to admire the idealism of 'Red Jørgen', ultimately it is impossible to sympathise with him and his destructive rampages. He follows Ursula to Rome, where her father, a connoisseur of the arts, State Councilor Branth — whom Hallager despises as the epitome of bourgeois society — swans with an expat 'Dutch colony' of cultural aesthetes, backslapping each other at their regular soirées. In the marital apartment, which daddy paid for, naïve Ursula believes she can tame her new husband ('you great, big barbarian wild man!'). She calls upon him to embrace the spectacular view from their balcony, the splendour of the spiritual capital, this centre of western civilisation. He, on the other hand, obsesses with his view that the world is dominated by the philistines and sell-outs — 'Arch scoundrels, Mountebanks … Infamous hypocrites' out to 'bamboozle the people, all the better to rob them and the fruits of their labors, blind and keep them in misery.' What drives him is a childhood grudge he bears against society because his father was falsely charged with embezzlement and imprisoned. The most sympathetic and decent character is Thorkild Drehling, who secretly loves Ursula, and is a Hallager devotee who gave up a family fortune to be beside his hero, only to be also denounced by Hallager. Regardless of who is ultimately right or wrong in determining what is art, if there ever can be such a conclusion, the fundamentalism of Hallager provides the dynamic for this sad, if not tragic and moral story. NYRB, this month, is also publishing Pontoppidan's masterpiece A Fortunate Man, again translated by Paul Larkin, another great addition to rediscovering overlooked or out-of-print works.