Novel
Niels Lyhne
Jens Peter Jacobsen · 1880
Opening lines
Hun havde Blidernes sorte, straalende Øje med det fine, snorlige Bryn, hun havde deres stærkt udformede Næse, deres kraftige Hage og svulmende Læber.
She had the Blids' black, shining eyes with the fine, straight brows; she had their strongly shaped nose, their powerful chin and full lips.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from tekster.kb.dk
Synopsis
Between a down-to-earth father and a mother steeped in poetry, Niels grows up on a provincial estate, dreaming of being a poet. He becomes attached first to a young aunt who has come to the country to recover her health, then, in Copenhagen, to Madame Boye, who mixes with artists won over to the new ideas, and later to his cousin Fennimore, who marries his friend Erik, a painter. Resolved to do without any faith and any consolation, he sees every love, every bereavement and every journey put this resolve to the test.
Context
The novel appears in Copenhagen from Gyldendal in 1880. Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, places its author's books beside the Bible among those one should carry on one's person; in Germany, where the Reclam edition circulates from 1889, it marks Thomas Mann. The English follows in 1896, under the title Siren Voices, then in 1919 and in 1990; the French in 1928, in the translation by R. Rémusat. Georg Lukács saw in it the first novel to describe the state of mind of the atheist bourgeois intelligentsia.
Who it is for
About two hundred and forty pages in the English edition, three hundred in French. A third-person narrative, slow and inward; the religious crisis of the end of the century sheds light on its theme.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the great Danish novels; Rilke, Thomas Mann and Hesse admired it, and it is held to be a precursor of the existentialist novel.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.