The White Bear

Henrik Pontoppidan, Paul Larkin

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Danish

NYRB Classics
17 June 2025

Classic fiction (pre c 1945); Horror & ghost stories

Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.

Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.

Henrik Pontoppidan, the Danish Nobel laureate, is admired for the concentrated force of his novellas as much as for long, populous, world-encompassing novels like A Fortunate Man, and here are two of those novellas, newly and brilliantly translated by Paul Larkin.

The White Bear follows the fate of the odd, gangly, red-bearded Thorkild M ller. 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 end Thorkild mysteriously disappears, presumably back to the snow wilderness of Greenland.

The Rearguard, on the other hand, is a marriage story. Newlyweds J rgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, J rgen 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. It is a tragic tale of art and idealism, individuality and love.

This translation was funded in part by a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

By: Henrik Pontoppidan, Paul Larkin
Imprint: NYRB Classics
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781681379296
ISBN 10: 1681379295
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 17 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) was one of Denmark's great realist writers, a member of the Modern Breakthrough movement whose works are often compared to those of Honore de Balzac and mile Zola. The son of a clergyman, he studied engineering in Copenhagen but then left to become a teacher and writer. For his numerous novels and short stories, he won the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature. Paul Larkin is a journalist, filmmaker, critic, and translator from the Danish and other Scandinavian languages. In 1997 The Gap in the Mountain... Our Journey into Europe, the six-part film series he wrote and directed as an independent production for RT , won him the European Journalist of the Year Award (the overall award and the film director category). In 2008, he was awarded the Best International Director prize at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival for his Irish-language docudrama Imeacht na nIarlai (The Flight of the Earls) starring Stephen Rea. He lives in a Gaeltacht area of County Donegal, Ireland, where Irish is the predominant language of everyday use.

Reviews for The White Bear

""Henrik Pontoppidan is a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers.""— Thomas Mann