Why Henrik Pontoppidan is more than a literary punchline

Henrik Pontoppidan has sufferecd the fate of a literary punchline: Tolstoy didn't win a Nobel Prize, Proust didn't win a Nobel Prize, but they gave a Nobel Prize in Literature to the Danish writer Henrik Pontoppidan! The fact is, he's more than just a joke. The Everyman Library has issued a new edition of his major work, Lucky Per (1904), and it's gotten a little attention because of the publication of an excerpt of the fine intro by the American writer Risk Hallberg - and his praise for this mostly forgotten work is on the money. I've read the first of 8 sections of this 600-page novel (published serially in Denmark over about 5 years), and so far it looks to be an excellent "bildungsroman," a novel of education - the story of the eponymous Per (Danish v. of Peter), raised by a strict minister in an impoverished household of I think 11 children, from which he rebels in youth and can't wait to escape; he goes off as a teenager to a technical institute in Copenhagen, and has dreams of turning the fjords and channels of Denmark into a navigational thoroughfare. But he finds the tech-school life stultifying and he gets involved with a sketch social scene, in particular w/ a married woman somewhat older than he is. He feels both attraction and repulsion toward her (and other women), and comes to the conclusion that there is really no such thing as sin - it's a concept created by the repressive powers that be. In many ways this novel foreshadows Freudian theories, and there's no doubt that HP influenced Thomas Mann, who did win a Nobel and he commented favorably on this work - it's really a model for modern fiction in the naturalistic style: young many making his way in the world, learning from painful experience, breaking free of a repressive family, overcoming the hardships of his youth, dreaming about making a tremendous contribution as artist/scientist/military leader; while Lucky Per foreshadows other literary works, we can easily trace the lineage back to great fiction of teh 19th century, most notably Stendahl (Red and Black in particular) and Flaubert (Sentimental Education in particular) - pretty good ancestry there.