Final notes on Henrik Pontoppidan's Lucky Per: Hallberg's defense of the stature of this work

Some final notes on Henrik Pontoppidan's Lucky Per (1904): Garth Risk Hallberg's intro is quite good; in fact, an edited version that appeared online earlier this year is what drew me to this obscure novel. Obviously Hallberg makes the case for this novel as a major work on modern fiction, and I think he's right - it's incredible that it wasn't available in English until this century! Now that it's published in a handsome Everyman edition I would hope more people might read it and might rank it up there w/ other great modern novels that give us a complex and nuanced portrait of a life and of a time and place in history. Hallberg several times references HP's "double vision," and I had not thought of that but there's some truth - largely because he uses a third person narration that, though closely aligned with Per's POV at times steps away from Per so that we see him as other seem him - in particular, regarding his complex relationship with Jakobe, his one-time fiancee. Hallber is also smart in his discussion of Jakobe's family a wealthy, urbane, financiers - a large and prosperous Jewish family in late 19th-century Copenhagen. We see through her eyes some of the discrimination against Jews, but most important, as Hallberg notes, her family is vivid and an integrated part of Danish cultural and business life - quite unlike the only real counterpart of Jewish families in 19th-c literature, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, in which the Jewish families are portrayed with great sympathy but they're really "types" and even exotics, meant to raise a polemical point - good intentions of course, but not as attuned to the actual experiences of Jews living in a world in which they are never fully accepted. The translator, Naomi Lebowitz, does a fine job with the text, which is always clear and even evocative; her :"afterword" was far too academic for me, and I think she could have done much more with the footnotes, which primarily identify characters and personages named in the novel, evern though most have little or no bearing on the plot. This edition could have benefited from notes to guide an English-language reader on Danish nomenclature and on the geography and topology of Copenhagen and Denmark. Still, great to have this novel available and well-distributed in an English-language version.