Lucky Per

Per Sidenius grows up the son of a strict provincial pastor and rejects that inheritance almost entirely, leaving home determined to remake himself as a modern man of engineering and ambition rather than faith, and Pontoppidan follows him to Copenhagen, where Per throws himself into a grand scheme to reengineer Denmark's waterways and harbors, chasing both professional recognition and, through his engagement to Jakobe, the wealthy daughter of a Jewish merchant family, a kind of social arrival his own background never offered him. For a long stretch of the novel Per looks like exactly the self made success story he set out to become, admired, engaged, on the edge of real achievement, and Pontoppidan keeps building that momentum until the character's own contradictions catch up with him: the same restlessness and pride that let Per break away from his father's house make it impossible for him to actually settle into the life he has built, and he ends his engagement to Jakobe and walks away from the career that was about to make him. Rather than trade one ambition for another, Per withdraws almost entirely, choosing an isolated, quiet later life over either the religious certainty he rejected as a young man or the worldly success he spent the whole novel chasing, a conclusion Pontoppidan presents without judgment, as much the case of a man who never actually wanted what he thought he wanted as of one defeated by the world.

Pontoppidan writes on the wide, socially observant scale associated with Balzac and Zola, tracking Denmark's own modernization, its politics, its class tensions, its uneven embrace of industry, through one representative and thoroughly unsentimental life, and it suits a reader drawn to a long, socially detailed novel more interested in the honest shape of a life than in a tidy resolution to it.