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

“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

“These tales of universal struggles teem with keen insights.” —Publishers Weekly

“Rife with cultural insight, no-holds-barred excoriations, and a firm conviction in the potential of the individual, The White Bear—a newly published collection of [Pontoppidan’s] novellas—provides a valuable entrance into a writer deeply suspicious of the hypocrisies and repressions of modern life … Paul Larkin’s translation is both elegant and resounding.” —Xiao Yue Shan, Asymptote

“A worthy introduction to Pontoppidan’s underread work … With his empathic portrayals of peasants and the down-and-out, his philosophical investigations into the soul, and his demands for reform among the clergy and greedy capitalists, Pontoppidan undeniably raised Danish social and political consciousness.”
—Christopher Urban, Commonweal

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.

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