In​ 1870 Hans Christian Andersen published his last novel, Lykke-Peer (‘Lucky Peer’). Felix and Peer are born in the same house on the same day. Felix leads a conventional existence of wealth and privilege. Peer’s life is all struggle, though he’s a talented singer and composer. He goes to the city and experiences every kind of hardship and temptation, but will not compromise the purity of his vocation. When he finally succeeds in staging an opera, he suffers a heart attack as the audience rises in a standing ovation: ‘as by a flash of lightning his days here were ended, ended without pain, ended in an earthly triumph, in the fulfilment of his mission on Earth. Lucky Peer!’

By giving his own masterpiece, published in eight volumes between 1898 and 1904, the title Lykke-Per, Henrik Pontoppidan was placing his work in the national literary tradition and inviting Danish readers to compare and contrast. Despite his winning the Nobel Prize in 1917, there was no English-language version of this extraordinary novel until Naomi Lebowitz’s appeared in 2010 with the title Lucky Per. Paul Larkin’s translation is entitled A Fortunate Man, which was also used for the 2018 Danish film adaptation. The cultural context is gone, but the question remains: what does it mean to be lucky, happy, fortunate?

Both a state-of-the-nation novel and an extended Bildungsroman, Pontoppidan’s narrative follows the vicissitudes of Peter Andreas (Per) Sidenius. Like the author, Per is born into a clergyman’s family in East Jutland in the 1850s. After defeat to Germany in the war of 1864, a third of Denmark’s territory is annexed, and the boy grows up in a period of national humiliation. His father, Johannes, and bedridden mother, Kirstine, are renowned for their puritan severity and frugality. Their behaviour is meekly accepted by Per’s ten brothers and sisters, but ‘almost from birth’ Per lives as ‘a stranger in his own home’. Rebellious and fearless, he becomes ‘the leader of a small gang of rogues’. He is punished by his parents and shunned by his siblings. The conflict reaches a climax when Per is caught stealing apples and his father delivers a terrifying commination at the dinner table, concluding with the worry that the boy will end his days ‘like that wretched brother upon whom the Lord pronounced his judgment of doom: Thou shalt be banished and without peace wherever in the world thou art.’ His siblings are distressed, but Per is unmoved. ‘For he now found that he could look upon the others with a feeling of innate superiority.’ They’re trolls, he thinks, ‘blind to life’s bright splendour’.

Nothing is hurried in this long, lavishly imagined book. At each point Pontoppidan builds up the context, evoking landscape and cityscape, dramatising not only the lives of his characters but the busy world around them. Soon it becomes clear that nothing can be understood on its own; every impulse and exchange is intimately connected to, if not predetermined by, a thousand others. Per’s father is not just a pastor, but one in a long line of pastors, men who see themselves as engaged in a perennial struggle with worldliness. There are comic descriptions of Johannes’s refusal to offer the hoped for funeral orations – ‘Not a word on the decency of the dearly departed and the fruitful furrow he had diligently ploughed’ – and the resulting indignation of a bourgeoisie devoted to ‘pomp and ceremony’, but obliged to hear the illustrious deceased described as no more than ‘this poor heap of dust’.

Per escapes from home on snowy nights, pulls pretty girls onto his sled and roars ‘“Make way there!” … with all the might his lungs possessed; for the world had to know of his triumph.’ This is ‘the raging torrent’ of a ‘youthful vitality’ that he is ‘forced to suppress at home’, something that makes him ‘slightly ridiculous’ even to his friends. But growing up he will feel ‘his own innate troll-like nature stirring within him’ and fear that he too is ‘an underworld troll – a true Sidenius’. It is as if Zola’s hereditary determinism had fused with Scandinavian fairy tale.

The boy’s parents despair, but his maths teacher insists he has talent. At sixteen he is sent to distant Copenhagen to study engineering, as was Pontoppidan. It’s the career Per believes offers ‘the best chance of realising his dream of leading a proud and free-spirited life’, while helping to forge ‘liberated mankind’s future success and prosperity’. Yet he is disappointed by the reality of a professor with the demeanour of an ‘entombed mummy’ and fellow students who want nothing more than pen-pushing jobs in the civil service. He retreats to his rented room, where, working night and day for months on end, he draws up an impossibly ambitious ‘monster project’, ‘no less than a fully developed network of waterways which linked all of Mid-Jutland’s larger rivers, lakes and fjord inlets to each other and joined the now cultivated heath, and its profusion of new town developments up there, with the sea on both sides’. Such an undertaking would revitalise Danish commerce and allow Per to return home victorious. He dreams ‘of becoming the actual benefactor for the very town which had borne witness to his daily humiliations’. It doesn’t occur to him that he sees life in the same embattled terms as his father, but with himself as saviour.

If readers now see parallels with Andersen’s tale of an incorruptible poor boy realising his dream in the city, they are soon disabused. Pontoppidan never allows his story or its protagonist to stand still. At his desk Per is afflicted by a ‘raft of demons’. His professor pours scorn on his project. This ‘benighted country’, Per tells himself, is not a place where a young man can be taken seriously. He begins to frequent the favourite café of Copenhagen’s ‘artistic and literary demi-monde’, not for the conversation but for ‘a tall, slim figure with a glorious mane of strawberry blonde hair’ behind the bar. Before long Fru Engelhardt, a married woman whom he meets at a carnival, invites him to a ball. He needs suitable clothes but, receiving only a small allowance from his parents, turns to moneylenders. Soon he is having his first affair. Rejoicing in his ‘conquest and subsequent feelings of superiority’, he condescends to an elderly romantic rival, who gently warns him that ‘good fortune is the preserve of fools’ and that Danes ‘have an immovable partiality for the tried and tested’: when ‘wonderland opens its gates to us … we become filled with doubt and turn to look back at that familiar seat by the stove.’

Per is unimpressed. ‘The main thing was that she now belonged to him.’ The rival kills himself and, in a move that briefly shifts the novel into the realm of fable, bequeaths to Per ‘a certain sum’ the young man can’t afford to refuse, though he’d like to. Waking in the night beside his mistress he is suddenly appalled by her indifference to the dead man’s fate and hears ‘his father’s commanding voice pronouncing half-forgotten words about “the power of the Dark One”’. He breaks off the relationship. ‘A country bumpkin you are,’ she tells him, ‘and a country bumpkin you will always remain!’ The rival’s prophecy is fulfilled and the pattern of Per’s behaviour established.

Many pages are spent describing the hardships and foibles of Per’s landlords and their family, ordinary people who are at ease with themselves, neither in thrall to a gloomy moral rectitude nor corrupt. Per feels comfortable in this world, but it’s not enough for him. ‘He knew that his destiny lay far beyond the realm of everyday concerns and mediocrity.’ Chastely in love with a pretty local girl, he rejects the chance of marriage to pursue his grand project, which becomes a practical proposition when he is introduced to ‘the small circle of money men who, at the end of the day, were society’s real decision makers’.

Per has an antipathy towards Jews. He has no time for the effusive Ivan Salomon, whom he meets at the artists’ café, and who quickly decides that Per is meant for great things, an ‘Aladdin figure, Fortune’s child’. Nevertheless, determined to act ‘ruthlessly and recklessly’ to achieve his ends, and aware that Ivan has a beautiful younger sister, Per agrees to meet the Salomons, one of the richest families in the country. It is the beginning of an immensely complex encounter of psychologies and cultures that forms the core of the novel and more than anything else constitutes its achievement. The Salomons are cultured, sophisticated and sociable. Per is captivated by the flirtatious sister, Nanny, and impressed by the furnishings in the Salomon home, the tapestries, paintings, leather-bound volumes. He is soon a regular guest, and begins to reflect on ‘the influence a good and secure standard of living actually had in securing the healthy spiritual growth of a person’. For the first time in his life he feels inferior. ‘Show respect for money!’ he wants to shout, in defiance of his Sidenius heritage.

Challenged by his ‘own soul’ to ‘renew his search for self-awareness’, Per gradually loses interest in the sunny but superficial Nanny, and turns to her older, quieter, ‘frightfully scrawny’ sister, Jakobe. Jakobe is as troubled as Nanny is carefree, aware of the antisemitism around her, already disappointed in love, accustomed to rejection, but ‘famed for her intellectual capabilities, her willpower and encyclopedic knowledge’. At their first meeting she thinks Per ‘positively hideous’, a ‘big brute’ tainted with ‘that stamp of poverty’ and clearly a gold-digger. His booming voice ‘chilled her to her very marrow’. At the same time she seems in no hurry to marry the staid, affluent widower Hr Eybert, whom everyone regards as her ‘future husband’.

Per finds he can talk seriously to Jakobe. They are both enthusiastic about the writings of the progressive intellectual Dr Nathan (based on the critic Georg Brandes), who is leading a crusade for Denmark’s renewal. For the first time Per opens up about his difficult relationship with his family, and eventually thanks Jakobe for helping him ‘to become a fully rounded person’. She gives him no encouragement, loathes the musty smell of his clothes, his self-importance, his ‘bull in a china shop’ approach to conversation. At the same time she is ‘plagued’ by erotic imaginings, and tortures herself ‘in her efforts to avoid thinking about him’. He will have to ‘conquer her’, he decides, ‘bit by bit’.

The deepening relationship between the two is convincingly and comically drawn. It culminates in a day of high drama, when Per first proposes and is rejected, then makes a fool of himself in an extended spat with Eybert, and finally chases Jakobe up the stairs, falls on his knees, grabs her hand and kisses it ‘repeatedly and passionately’. In an instant the two are embracing and the die is cast: ‘She was in his power.’ ‘Per Sidenius, the son of a poverty-stricken, rural cleric … was now the prospective joint owner of millions and millions!’ The asymmetrical engagement bewilders everyone. Jakobe’s parents, alarmed, insist on a delay before the betrothal is made official and pay for Per to visit major engineering projects abroad. Inspired by Brandes, he writes a fiery pamphlet on the need to transform Denmark – harnessing the power of the wind and tides to produce electricity – which Jakobe finds naive and poorly written. Nobody, least of all the reader, can decide whether Per is a genius or a chancer. From Berlin a certain Professor Pfefferkorn writes to the Salomons to commend the youngster as ‘a prototype for the decisive, hands-on man of the coming century’. Per, meanwhile, is now eyeing a pretty German heiress even wealthier than Jakobe. He has decided that he must be ‘true to his own personal battle cry: I will!’

It’s at this precarious moment that Per receives a telegram: ‘Father dying.’ For years he has refused to visit his sick parents. He doesn’t have ‘one happy memory’ of his childhood. Now he goes home and is overwhelmed by the past. Shaking his father’s hand on his deathbed, Per has ‘the completely crushing feeling of having been called forth by some omnipotent judge’. While his siblings sing ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, ‘filled with pride as they saw the gates of heaven open above their heads’, he has to fight ‘the urge to be swept up in their rapture’. At the funeral he is astonished by the huge turnout; over time the townsfolk had come to love Johannes for the very severity they initially loathed. His father was not a troll but ‘a prince being followed to his grave by a grieving populace’. ‘Nothing had turned out’ as Per ‘had imagined it would’. Aware that this represents ‘a watershed in his life’, he abandons society life in Berlin and heads to a remote village in the Austrian Alps where the course of a river is being altered after disastrous flooding. Rather than studying this feat of engineering, however, he spends his time reading philosophy. Unsettled by the ‘sheer vastness’ of the mountains and the ‘eternal silence that prevailed there’, he decides not to leave the area before he has ‘achieved full clarity, absolute assurance of what it actually meant to exist’. Yet ‘the more he read the more confused he became.’

Back in Copenhagen, by contrast, Jakobe has abandoned literature and philosophy for books on physics and engineering. Suspecting that Per is going through a crisis – she has noted the susceptibility of Christians to ‘sudden attacks of scruples and doubt’ – she tracks him down to his mountain retreat. The two become lovers and enjoy an idyllic interlude. ‘All at once, life took on a fullness and beauty he had never dreamed of.’ With renewed excitement that the whole world is before him, on a mountain hike Per pulls out a gun and blows away the ‘fake humility’ of a crucifix beside the path, crying: ‘Here’s a shot to herald the dawn of a new century.’ We are in the territory of D.H. Lawrence.

All too soon Jakobe has to return to Copenhagen. Per travels to Rome, where he runs into Nanny. She is now married to a rising star in Danish journalism but already dissatisfied, and flirts readily with her sister’s fiancé. Caught up in the atmosphere of the city, Per reflects that Jakobe, ‘with her peculiar nature … was ill-suited to the kind of daring and connoisseur lifestyle to which he aspired’. It seems he cannot settle. No insight or passion really takes root. Despite letters begging him to return to Copenhagen, where a consortium of investors is interested in financing his great project, Per dawdles in Rome while a sculptor makes a bust of him with a ‘cocky and contrived emperor demeanour’.

The novel is past its halfway point. There are three great dramas to come, each introducing a new set of characters and subplots, and each climaxing in Per’s rejection of the different kinds of conventional fortune that Denmark offers him. At a meeting with his potential funders, Per stuns everyone by refusing to agree to a simple concession they are demanding, hence losing this great opportunity. ‘Why,’ he asks the more pragmatic Jakobe, ‘is it any less shameful to humiliate yourself before Mammon and the Golden Calf than for the crucifix?’ What he doesn’t tell her is how troubled he is to have learned that his mother and siblings have moved to Copenhagen; she doesn’t tell him she’s pregnant.

In the next great set-piece, much of Danish high society – intellectuals, writers and bankers – gathers at the Salomon house for the party at which Jakobe’s father is to announce her engagement. The evening begins, however, with a highly charged encounter between Per and Nanny. Per is now hopelessly confused, intensely aware as he responds to his future father-in-law’s toast of ‘the utter aversion he had inherited from his ancestors towards this comfortably cosmopolitan and openly Epicurean social set’. Yet many of the guests admire him for the stance he took against the financiers and the unimpressed figure he cuts at his own engagement party. ‘The more foolish things you do,’ Jakobe’s uncle tells him, ‘the more acclaim rises for your name.’ The long, fraught evening ends with a reconciliation with Jakobe, followed by a panic attack. When some days later Per hears that his mother has died and contrives to board the ship carrying her coffin to Jutland, the reader is prepared for what happens next: a second renunciation, in the form of a letter that ends the engagement with Jakobe and once again plunges him into poverty. Perhaps his real fortune, he reflects, ‘lies in the very fact of being a restless spirit’.

Gradually, with immense torment and frequent backsliding, Per’s youthful will to overcome all opposition gives way to a process of self-discovery and self-overcoming. He takes refuge in rural Jutland, returns to the Church and falls in love with Inger, the daughter of a prominent clergyman who preaches a liberal Christianity. Refused a loan by those who until recently were his friends, he humbles himself before his brothers and sisters and borrows from them the money to complete his engineering degree so that he can propose to Inger. But the novel has now moved into the territory of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: a bourgeois Christianity cannot satisfy Per for long, and he soon falls into a depression. He remembers his father’s words about the fate of Cain, ‘banished and without peace wherever in the world thou art’. Only now does Per understand his essential ‘aloofness and dread of life’. He realises that he has always been a Sidenius troll, and decides to embrace this. The story of how he eventually contrives to disentangle himself from the apparently happy family life he has taken years to construct is at once shocking and moving. In a final nod to Andersen’s Lucky Peer, by the end Per has achieved a form of happiness, but one nobody would have wished for him.

The two translations of the novel, though both highly readable, are markedly different. Naomi Lebowitz, an American academic and critic, offers a restrained, syntactically sophisticated version. Paul Larkin, an Irish filmmaker who worked for some years in the Danish merchant navy, writes a livelier prose, packed with idiom, alliteration and rhythm, though it’s disconcerting that his version is some 30 to 40 per cent longer than Lebowitz’s, which is itself a little longer than the original.

It’s curious to read such an ambitious novel, written for the most part in the 19th-century realist tradition, from a country about which I know very little. As with the great Russian or French novels of the period, many local references mean less to me than they do to native readers. It’s clear, for example, that Per’s struggle with competing value systems is intended to reflect long-standing polarities in Danish society. What is recognisable is the high seriousness of the endeavour and the belief that with a huge effort of the imagination, combined with the acute observation of a wide range of human behaviour, the novel could be used to bring readers to some ultimate wisdom. If, despite his vainglorious fickleness, Per never loses our sympathy, it is because of his openness to ‘a voice from deep within … the voice of a phantom asking: But who are you yourself?’