Lucky Per

Lucky Per (Danish: Lykke-Per) is a novel by Danish Nobel Prize–winning author Henrik Pontoppidan published in eight volumes between 1898 and 1904. It is considered one of the major Danish novels, and in 2004 it was made part of the Danish Culture Canon.^[1]

The novel tells the story of Per Sidenius, a self-confident, richly gifted man who breaks with his religious family and the constraints of his heritage and social background in order to become an engineer. However, at the height of his success, they at last catch up with him and force him to give up his career, leaving him lonely. For the character of Per Sidenius, Pontoppidan drew on his own history as a Jutlandic vicar's son who traveled to Copenhagen to train as an engineer before becoming an author.^[2]

The novel was well received by German literati such as Thomas Mann, Georg Lukács, and Ernst Bloch, who considered it "a cosmopolitan masterpiece of epochal sweep and a profound social, psychological, and metaphysical anatomy of the modernist transition".^[3] While it had been translated into 11 languages before the end of the 20th century, the first English translation was published in 2010 by Naomi Lebowitz, titled "Lucky Per". A new translation by Irish author and translator Paul Larkin was published in October 2018 by the Museum Tusculanum Press. Larkin's translation, titled 'A Fortunate Man', is based on the 1905 version of Pontoppidan's text. Danish director Bille August's film adaptation of the novel is also called A Fortunate Man in its English language version and was released in the late summer of 2018.^[4][5]

A major theme of the story is the relation of "luck" to "happiness," as the Danish word lykke can mean both happiness as well as good luck or fortune.^[6] While Per initially considers happiness to be the result of success and the achievement of projects and goals in the mundane world, he eventually realizes that happiness can be achieved independently of the luck that leads to success. For Pontoppidan, Per's withdrawal from the bustling scene of Copenhagen is therefore not to be understood as defeat, but as a victory over the very circumstances that define his success.^[7]