Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Nordic Book Club meets monthly via Zoom to discuss contemporary literature in translation. On September 9, we’ll be discussing the classic Danish novellas The White Bear and The Rearguard by Danish Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan, out now in new translation by Paul Larkin from NYRB Classics.
Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. The White Bear follows the fate of the odd, gangly, red-bearded Thorkild Müller. Born in rural Jutland and destined for the ministry, Thorkild proves to be a poor student and is assigned to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland. There, with his mythic-looking staff and dogskin skullcap, he becomes known as the White Bear—a beloved legend among the locals and a freewheeling embarrassment to his fellow priests. Grown old, he returns to Denmark, where again his flock adores him while his fellow men of cloth try to tame the “whirling dervish in their midst.”
In The Rearguard, newlyweds Jørgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jørgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism; Ursula comes from a conservative, upper-middle-class family. At first, as they start their married life in Rome, they each try to change the other’s worldview with arguments and threats, but as time wears on and they wear each other down, it becomes clear there can be no reconciliation in this tale of art and idealism, individuality and love.
The White Bear and The Rearguard is available as a single volume in paperbook and eBook from Penguin Random House and other retailers.
*Please note that, while titled only as The White Bear, the book contains both novellas.*
“The ice, the fjords, the harshness of lonely winter and the revitalizing light of summer . . . This is vivid writing, reminiscent of Knut Hamsun on landscape, and Halldór Laxness on the comedy of life.” —Danny Morrison, Irish Examiner
