A welcome, if much belated, entry in modern European literature in translation and deserving of a wide readership.
A forgotten Danish novel, first published more than a century ago and well-known in Europe, appears for the first time in English translation.
In this serial novel, which blends the grim moralism of Ibsen with the careful description of French realists like Zola and Flaubert, Pontoppidan spins a long story that borrows much from his own life. Peter Andreas Sidenius, Per for short, is the son of a Protestant minister in the Danish countryside, the fjord-carved coast of Jutland. One of 11 children, he has always been a willful boy, and “already, at an early age, a deliberate insubordination surfaced in him in the face of the rules and customs of the house.” One thing he surely doesn’t want to hear about is God or his father’s long-winded tales that always carry with them a moral of how good Christians should live. It takes some doing, but after demonstrating his intelligence, Per is allowed to go to Copenhagen and enroll in an engineering course—and to good ends, for he has a plan to straighten out the fjords, build canals, and turn Denmark into a major economic power. Some of the people he comes into contact with in school, his boardinghouse, and the local cafes “where he wasted more time and money than he could afford" dismiss him as a dreamer and his plan as too immature, but others encourage him. In this connection, he forms a friendship with Ivan Salomon, scion of a wealthy Jewish family, whose sister Jakobe becomes a source of fascination for Per—yet not enough that he can break away entirely from convention. Per, in his spiritual torment, becomes an embodiment of Kierkegaard-ian angst, while Jakobe, refreshingly, is a fully rounded, sympathetic character, a kind of literary cousin to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Pontoppidan’s novel is a little fusty here and there, but as a bildungsroman, it merits company alongside the best of Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann.
A welcome, if much belated, entry in modern European literature in translation and deserving of a wide readership.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-90809-9
Page Count: 664
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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