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Niels Lyhne
According to Johan de Mylius of the Danish Royal Library, Jens Peter Jacobsen and particularly his novel Niels Lyhne, a naturalist work, was a "poet associated with the so-called 'modern breakthrough' in Danish literature in the 1870s. . . . Jacobsen's immediate importance was his status as the 'writer of his generation.' With the novel Niels Lyhne (1880) he voiced the disoriented and confused rejection of the old values, Romanticism's dream and religion. . . . Like the single volume of short stories Jacobsen published in 1882, three years before he died of tuberculosis, both novels are unique in an age of realism on account of their highly charged, atmospheric prose and almost lyrical style."
146 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1880
About the author
Jens Peter Jacobsen
91 books189 followersJacobsen was born in Thisted in Jutland, the eldest of the five children of a prosperous merchant. He went to school in Copenhagen and was a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1868. As a boy, he showed a remarkable talent for science, in particular botany. In 1870, although he was already secretly writing poetry, Jacobsen adopted botany as a profession. He was sent by a scientific body in Copenhagen to report on the flora of the islands of Anholt and Læsø.
Around this time, the discoveries of Charles Darwin began to fascinate him. Realizing that the work of Darwin was not well known in Denmark, he translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man into Danish.
When still young, Jacobsen was struck by tuberculosis which eventually ended his life. His illness prompted travels to southern Europe.
Literary works:
Jacobsen's canon consists of two novels, seven short stories, and one posthumous volume of poetry—small, but enough to place him as one of the most influential Danish writers.
Prose:
The historical novel Fru Marie Grubbe (1876, Eng. trans.: Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Century, 1917) is the first Danish treatment of a woman as a sexual creature. Based upon the life of an authentic 17th century Danish noblewoman, it charts her downfall from a member of the royal family to the wife of a ferryman, as a result of her desire for an independent and satisfying erotic life. In many ways the book anticipates the themes of D. H. Lawrence.
Jacobsen's second novel, Niels Lyhne (1880, Eng. trans. 1919), traces the fate of an atheist in a merciless world: his lack of faith is "tested" by tragedies and personal crises until he dies in war, disillusioned but unrepentant.
Jacobsen's short stories are collected in Mogens og andre Noveller (1882, translated as Mogens and Other Tales, 1921, and Mogens and Other Stories, 1994). Among them must be mentioned "Mogens" (1872—his official debut), the tale of a young dreamer and his maturing during love, sorrow and new hope of love. "Et Skud i Taagen" ("A Shot in the Fog") is a Poe-inspired tale of the sterility of hatred and revenge. "Pesten i Bergamo" ("The Plague of Bergamo") shows people clinging to religion even when tempted to be "free men". Fru Fønss (1882) is a sad story about a widow's tragic break with her egoistic children when she wants to remarry.
Mogens og andre Noveller and Niels Lyhne were both highly praised by Rainer Maria Rilke in his letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, translated as Letters to a Young Poet.
Poetry:
The poems of Jacobsen are more influenced by late romanticism than his prose. Many of them are wistful, dreamy and melancholic but also naturalistic. Most important is the great obscure poem "Arabesque to a Hand-drawing by Michel Angelo" (about 1875) the idea of which seems to be that art is going to replace immortality as the meaning of life. They significantly inspired the Danish symbolist poetry of the 1890s.
Around this time, the discoveries of Charles Darwin began to fascinate him. Realizing that the work of Darwin was not well known in Denmark, he translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man into Danish.
When still young, Jacobsen was struck by tuberculosis which eventually ended his life. His illness prompted travels to southern Europe.
Literary works:
Jacobsen's canon consists of two novels, seven short stories, and one posthumous volume of poetry—small, but enough to place him as one of the most influential Danish writers.
Prose:
The historical novel Fru Marie Grubbe (1876, Eng. trans.: Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Century, 1917) is the first Danish treatment of a woman as a sexual creature. Based upon the life of an authentic 17th century Danish noblewoman, it charts her downfall from a member of the royal family to the wife of a ferryman, as a result of her desire for an independent and satisfying erotic life. In many ways the book anticipates the themes of D. H. Lawrence.
Jacobsen's second novel, Niels Lyhne (1880, Eng. trans. 1919), traces the fate of an atheist in a merciless world: his lack of faith is "tested" by tragedies and personal crises until he dies in war, disillusioned but unrepentant.
Jacobsen's short stories are collected in Mogens og andre Noveller (1882, translated as Mogens and Other Tales, 1921, and Mogens and Other Stories, 1994). Among them must be mentioned "Mogens" (1872—his official debut), the tale of a young dreamer and his maturing during love, sorrow and new hope of love. "Et Skud i Taagen" ("A Shot in the Fog") is a Poe-inspired tale of the sterility of hatred and revenge. "Pesten i Bergamo" ("The Plague of Bergamo") shows people clinging to religion even when tempted to be "free men". Fru Fønss (1882) is a sad story about a widow's tragic break with her egoistic children when she wants to remarry.
Mogens og andre Noveller and Niels Lyhne were both highly praised by Rainer Maria Rilke in his letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, translated as Letters to a Young Poet.
Poetry:
The poems of Jacobsen are more influenced by late romanticism than his prose. Many of them are wistful, dreamy and melancholic but also naturalistic. Most important is the great obscure poem "Arabesque to a Hand-drawing by Michel Angelo" (about 1875) the idea of which seems to be that art is going to replace immortality as the meaning of life. They significantly inspired the Danish symbolist poetry of the 1890s.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 267 reviews
November 25, 2013
"For the first time he had felt fear about life, for the first time he had truly understood that when life had sentenced you to suffer, this sentence was neither a pretense nor a threat- you were dragged to the rack and then you were tortured, and no fairy-tale liberation came at the last moment, no sudden awakening as if from a bad dream.”- Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
A book I probably wouldnt have picked up had I not come across a beautiful quote from it here on Goodreads. It's the coming-of-age story of Niels Lyhne, a Danish boy striving to be a poet. My copy had a melancholy-looking painting by Edvard Munsch on the cover and indeed the book is quite bleak and dreary at times. It deals with disappointments, atheism, loss of creativity, death and love, among other things.
What I loved the most about this book was its beautiful prose. It was poetic and at times philosophical, sometimes heavy and depressing. As Niels grows up he experiences psychological growth, aided by his experiences with various women, which help formulate his realizations of life in general:
“But love was in their hearts and yet was not really there- just as crystals exist in a supersaturated solution and yet do not exist, until a splinter or simply a speck of the right substance sinks into the liquid and as if by magic instantly precipitates out the slumbering atoms so that they race to meet each other, wedging themselves together, rivet upon rivet, according to unfathomable laws, and become all of a sudden a crystal…crystal.”
This is definitely a book I would read again and again.
A book I probably wouldnt have picked up had I not come across a beautiful quote from it here on Goodreads. It's the coming-of-age story of Niels Lyhne, a Danish boy striving to be a poet. My copy had a melancholy-looking painting by Edvard Munsch on the cover and indeed the book is quite bleak and dreary at times. It deals with disappointments, atheism, loss of creativity, death and love, among other things.
What I loved the most about this book was its beautiful prose. It was poetic and at times philosophical, sometimes heavy and depressing. As Niels grows up he experiences psychological growth, aided by his experiences with various women, which help formulate his realizations of life in general:
“But love was in their hearts and yet was not really there- just as crystals exist in a supersaturated solution and yet do not exist, until a splinter or simply a speck of the right substance sinks into the liquid and as if by magic instantly precipitates out the slumbering atoms so that they race to meet each other, wedging themselves together, rivet upon rivet, according to unfathomable laws, and become all of a sudden a crystal…crystal.”
This is definitely a book I would read again and again.
January 7, 2018
This is easily one of the best books i have ever read. Jens Peter Jacobsen is an extraordinary writer.The literary talent is so evident and undeniable.This is a book of profound ideas and deep ruminations.The prose has such lyrical beauty that at times i felt i was listening to a Schubert symphony or looking at a Vermeer painting.Some parts where the writer talks about Niels' (the protagonist) inner monologues reminded me of James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'.It is a pity that Jacobsen died pretty young.I just wish he had penned more works like this...for then his name would have surely been mentioned alongside the likes of Proust and Tolstoy.
January 8, 2024
A Great Neglected Novel
The Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen's 1880 novel, "Niels Lyhne" is one of the best novels that most American readers are unlikely to know. I knew of the book for some time but read it only recently. One of my favorite writers, the British Victorian novelist George Gissing greatly admired "Niels Lyhne"; Gissing's own too- little read novel "Born in Exile" owes "Niels Lyhne" a substantial debt. More recently, I had been thinking about tendencies to deprecate the Enlightenment and the secularism which forms a critical part of it. Reaction to Enlightenment forms a central theme of "Niels Lyhne". I also happened upon the famous "Letters to a Young Poet" written by Rainer Maria Rilke, who lavished high praise on Jacobsen's novel. Rilke wrote to his correspondent, a would-be poet named Franz Kappus:
"If I were to say from whom I have learned about the nature of creative work, about its depth and everlastingness, I could give only two names: Jacobsen, that great, great, writer, and Auguste Rodin, the sculptor".
Later in his "Letters", Rilke wrote to Kappus elaborating upon Jacobsen's novel:
"Now Niels Lyhne will open up before you, a book of such splendors and depths; the more often one reads it, the more it seems to include everything, from the mildest fragrances of life to the full, rich taste of its heaviest fruits. There is nothing there that has not been understood, apprehended, experienced and recognized in the tremulous echo of memory; no experience has been too insignificant, and the smallest incident unfolds as a kind of destiny, and destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which each thread is guided by an infinitely delicate hand, placed beside the next and held and supported by a hundred others."
I read "Niels Lyhne" at last. The book warrants the high esteem in which Rilke, Gissing, and other readers have held it.
"Niles Lyhne" is a difficult, passionately written book which centers upon religious faith and its loss, sexuality, and the conflict between romanticism and realism. The book follows the life of its hero, Niels Lyhne, from his birth to his prosperous but mismatched parents to his death in early middle age from a battle wound in the army. "Nilels Lyhne" is a death-haunted work indeed as many of its characters, including the protagonist, meet an untimely end. Jacobsen wrote the novel knowing he was mortally ill with only a short time to live. The book also is for people who know what it is to be alone.
Young Niels Lyhne is dreamy, romantic and introspective. At the age of 12 Lyhne's aunt, 25, with whom he had become infatuated, dies on her sickbed before him, in spite of the boy's fervent prayers for her recovery. From that point forward, Lyhne becomes a confirmed atheist who for the rest of his life both rejects religion and engages in a search for meaning through art and through romantic love.
Most of the book describes Lyhne's relationships with a series of women. Most of the relationships end unhappily as the object of Lhyne's affections marry someone else or otherwise fall out of his life. Lhyne tends to idealize women and put them on a pedestal. Most of the women are independent, strong-willed, and emancipated, in the term of that day, and try to impress on the young man that they are but flesh and blood, as he is.
Besides his romantic interests, Lyhne is both a thinker and a budding poet. He is greatly imaginative and talented but to his great regret allows his gift to dissipate as the novel proceeds. The novel is replete with long discussions about art, poetry, society and social change and, most of all, religion and the search for meaning in a world without God.
"Niels Lhyne" is a wildly emotional book with long, ranting and passionate discussions of the beauty of nature and of flowers, of ideals, the need for love, the search for faith and more. The intensity of Jacobsen's writing drives the story in tones ranging from banter and satire to high seriousness. Long passages of romantic, highly stylized writing are juxtaposed with short sentences and with sections of the most prosaic realism. A talented biologist who translated Darwin into Danish as well as a poet, Jacobsen in this novel explores the tensions between a hard-headedly realistic approach to life and romanticism or faith. With all the passion of the writing, "Niels Lyhne" recognizes ambiguity. It is thoughtful.
Many 20th Century novelists have developed the themes of religion and secularism, sexuality and gender egalitarianism, and realism and romanticism that Jacobsen explored in "Niels Lyhne". Jacobsen's book remains a highly individual, idiosyncratic work with its own perspective and understanding. Readers who admire writers such as Gissing, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse (all of whom knew Jacobsen's novel) as well as writers such as Camus and John Updike, among many others, will enjoy this bracing, somewhat off-the-beaten-path novel, "Niels Lyhne".
Robin Friedman
The Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen's 1880 novel, "Niels Lyhne" is one of the best novels that most American readers are unlikely to know. I knew of the book for some time but read it only recently. One of my favorite writers, the British Victorian novelist George Gissing greatly admired "Niels Lyhne"; Gissing's own too- little read novel "Born in Exile" owes "Niels Lyhne" a substantial debt. More recently, I had been thinking about tendencies to deprecate the Enlightenment and the secularism which forms a critical part of it. Reaction to Enlightenment forms a central theme of "Niels Lyhne". I also happened upon the famous "Letters to a Young Poet" written by Rainer Maria Rilke, who lavished high praise on Jacobsen's novel. Rilke wrote to his correspondent, a would-be poet named Franz Kappus:
"If I were to say from whom I have learned about the nature of creative work, about its depth and everlastingness, I could give only two names: Jacobsen, that great, great, writer, and Auguste Rodin, the sculptor".
Later in his "Letters", Rilke wrote to Kappus elaborating upon Jacobsen's novel:
"Now Niels Lyhne will open up before you, a book of such splendors and depths; the more often one reads it, the more it seems to include everything, from the mildest fragrances of life to the full, rich taste of its heaviest fruits. There is nothing there that has not been understood, apprehended, experienced and recognized in the tremulous echo of memory; no experience has been too insignificant, and the smallest incident unfolds as a kind of destiny, and destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which each thread is guided by an infinitely delicate hand, placed beside the next and held and supported by a hundred others."
I read "Niels Lyhne" at last. The book warrants the high esteem in which Rilke, Gissing, and other readers have held it.
"Niles Lyhne" is a difficult, passionately written book which centers upon religious faith and its loss, sexuality, and the conflict between romanticism and realism. The book follows the life of its hero, Niels Lyhne, from his birth to his prosperous but mismatched parents to his death in early middle age from a battle wound in the army. "Nilels Lyhne" is a death-haunted work indeed as many of its characters, including the protagonist, meet an untimely end. Jacobsen wrote the novel knowing he was mortally ill with only a short time to live. The book also is for people who know what it is to be alone.
Young Niels Lyhne is dreamy, romantic and introspective. At the age of 12 Lyhne's aunt, 25, with whom he had become infatuated, dies on her sickbed before him, in spite of the boy's fervent prayers for her recovery. From that point forward, Lyhne becomes a confirmed atheist who for the rest of his life both rejects religion and engages in a search for meaning through art and through romantic love.
Most of the book describes Lyhne's relationships with a series of women. Most of the relationships end unhappily as the object of Lhyne's affections marry someone else or otherwise fall out of his life. Lhyne tends to idealize women and put them on a pedestal. Most of the women are independent, strong-willed, and emancipated, in the term of that day, and try to impress on the young man that they are but flesh and blood, as he is.
Besides his romantic interests, Lyhne is both a thinker and a budding poet. He is greatly imaginative and talented but to his great regret allows his gift to dissipate as the novel proceeds. The novel is replete with long discussions about art, poetry, society and social change and, most of all, religion and the search for meaning in a world without God.
"Niels Lhyne" is a wildly emotional book with long, ranting and passionate discussions of the beauty of nature and of flowers, of ideals, the need for love, the search for faith and more. The intensity of Jacobsen's writing drives the story in tones ranging from banter and satire to high seriousness. Long passages of romantic, highly stylized writing are juxtaposed with short sentences and with sections of the most prosaic realism. A talented biologist who translated Darwin into Danish as well as a poet, Jacobsen in this novel explores the tensions between a hard-headedly realistic approach to life and romanticism or faith. With all the passion of the writing, "Niels Lyhne" recognizes ambiguity. It is thoughtful.
Many 20th Century novelists have developed the themes of religion and secularism, sexuality and gender egalitarianism, and realism and romanticism that Jacobsen explored in "Niels Lyhne". Jacobsen's book remains a highly individual, idiosyncratic work with its own perspective and understanding. Readers who admire writers such as Gissing, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse (all of whom knew Jacobsen's novel) as well as writers such as Camus and John Updike, among many others, will enjoy this bracing, somewhat off-the-beaten-path novel, "Niels Lyhne".
Robin Friedman
November 2, 2014
Life isn't always grand, life isn't always tragic. It isn't always filled with success and it isn't always filled with failure, it isn't right and it isn't wrong. Sometimes, probably a lotta times, life just is, and there's beauty in that. So while you're striving forward look left and right and stop and appreciate. Don't adhere but don't give in. Above all, be natural.
That's roughly what I took away from Niels Lyhne.
That's roughly what I took away from Niels Lyhne.
October 29, 2018
I wonder if Ingmar Bergman read this? I can almost imagine he did.
"There are those who can take up their sorrow and bear it, strong temperaments who feel their strength in the very weight of the burden, while those who are weaker give in to the sorrow, as powerlessly as they would surrender to an illness; like an illness, grief penetrates them, seeping its way into their innermost being and becoming one with them; it is transformed within them in a slow battle and then lost inside them in a full recovery.
But there are also those for whom grief is a violence directed against them, a cruelty that they never learn to regard as a test or a prayer or merely as simple fate. For them it is a manifestation of tyranny, something personally hateful, and there will always be a thorn left in their hearts."
----
"All childhood influences shape the soft clay; everything shapes it, everything has significance, whatever exists and whatever is dreamed, whatever is known and whatever is sensed—it all imposes its light but surely drawn network of lines, which must be reshaped and deepened, and then must be smoothed away and erased."
----
"He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion—so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him."
----
"Happy is the person who, in his grief, when one of his loved ones is gone, can weep all his tears at the emptiness, abandonment, and loss; for they are heavier, more bitter tears that must atone for what bygone days have seen of lack of love for the one who is now dead, toward whom no offense can be expiated again. For now they come back: not only the harsh words, meticulously poisoned replies, intolerant censure, and thoughtless anger, but also caustic thoughts that were never voiced, hasty judgments that raced through your mind, lonely shrugs of the shoulder and unseen smiles, full of scorn and impatience; they all come back like evil arrows and sink their shafts deep in your own breast, their shafts blunt because the points have broken off in the heart that is no more. It is no more, there is nothing you can make good again, nothing. Now there is plenty of love in your heart, but now it is too late; go on up to the cold grave with your full heart! Can you get any closer? Plant flowers and weave wreaths—do you get any closer?"
"There are those who can take up their sorrow and bear it, strong temperaments who feel their strength in the very weight of the burden, while those who are weaker give in to the sorrow, as powerlessly as they would surrender to an illness; like an illness, grief penetrates them, seeping its way into their innermost being and becoming one with them; it is transformed within them in a slow battle and then lost inside them in a full recovery.
But there are also those for whom grief is a violence directed against them, a cruelty that they never learn to regard as a test or a prayer or merely as simple fate. For them it is a manifestation of tyranny, something personally hateful, and there will always be a thorn left in their hearts."
----
"All childhood influences shape the soft clay; everything shapes it, everything has significance, whatever exists and whatever is dreamed, whatever is known and whatever is sensed—it all imposes its light but surely drawn network of lines, which must be reshaped and deepened, and then must be smoothed away and erased."
----
"He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion—so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him."
----
"Happy is the person who, in his grief, when one of his loved ones is gone, can weep all his tears at the emptiness, abandonment, and loss; for they are heavier, more bitter tears that must atone for what bygone days have seen of lack of love for the one who is now dead, toward whom no offense can be expiated again. For now they come back: not only the harsh words, meticulously poisoned replies, intolerant censure, and thoughtless anger, but also caustic thoughts that were never voiced, hasty judgments that raced through your mind, lonely shrugs of the shoulder and unseen smiles, full of scorn and impatience; they all come back like evil arrows and sink their shafts deep in your own breast, their shafts blunt because the points have broken off in the heart that is no more. It is no more, there is nothing you can make good again, nothing. Now there is plenty of love in your heart, but now it is too late; go on up to the cold grave with your full heart! Can you get any closer? Plant flowers and weave wreaths—do you get any closer?"
July 8, 2020
Words in their connections of letters are once -removed from what it is they try to describe. Perhaps music comes the closest in their notes evoking emotions ringing true. However, Jacobsen, in his novel, Neils Lyhne, removes that distance between that which curls off the end of his pen and what is.
Not just the expression of emotion from the realist fold, nor the unconscious expression but the evolution of unconscious emotion and the tone(s) left upon life and the world. In all that poetic nuance.
This is a book of tender passion. A rare occurrence in my reading life.
Though I wrote the above earlier it remains true. At first it stunned me not thinking this was a possibility. Then I realized that the book held in my hands was shaking my reading world. It all made sense that the author influenced and/or was endorsed by; Rilke, Mann, Freud, Ibsen, Hesse, Strindberg, Joyce, Zweig. Especially Rilke who he mentored and in Rilke’s, Letters to a Young Poet, he mentions Jacobsen and his work a number of times.
This coming so close to the sun; the glaring heat, its searing penetration was even heightened more by the acuity of psychological events unfolding. His knowledge is breathtaking but the banner never risen as it is woven into the unwinding fabric; blended.
What happened near the end of this book written in 1880, is that; and I hate to even say it…but it sought a… plot. Holding the book upside down I shook it as best I can hoping the words trying to build some kind of plot would fall out and away. They remained in and left major events not supported but slipped in to create an urgent feel of surprise? A rushing to leave me gazing at this, up to now beautifully structured tale, bulging and stuffed at points; a disheveled sack. Fortunately Jacobsen realized what he had done, how he forced themes to unnecessarily arise against their will. Resettling his papers, inking his pen, he wrote an ending, for me a wise and breathtaking ending, that tied the book together.
So, then I thought in terms of a GR war of acrobatics. This heralded book slipped below the 5 star rating into some fractionalized algebraic equation tottering between a 4 and 5 star rating. Getting out my slide-rule; not that I know what to do with it and the last time I tried I injured myself, realized the sum total of historic success minus the craven need for a plot and emphasis on bleating out the essential themes, still left the sum total over 5. I rechecked all equations and measurements to find that the actual rating was a 5.2/5. This confirms that this is essential reading. Also part of the extra .2 is that it is an entertaining and enjoyable read.
Not just the expression of emotion from the realist fold, nor the unconscious expression but the evolution of unconscious emotion and the tone(s) left upon life and the world. In all that poetic nuance.
This is a book of tender passion. A rare occurrence in my reading life.
Though I wrote the above earlier it remains true. At first it stunned me not thinking this was a possibility. Then I realized that the book held in my hands was shaking my reading world. It all made sense that the author influenced and/or was endorsed by; Rilke, Mann, Freud, Ibsen, Hesse, Strindberg, Joyce, Zweig. Especially Rilke who he mentored and in Rilke’s, Letters to a Young Poet, he mentions Jacobsen and his work a number of times.
This coming so close to the sun; the glaring heat, its searing penetration was even heightened more by the acuity of psychological events unfolding. His knowledge is breathtaking but the banner never risen as it is woven into the unwinding fabric; blended.
What happened near the end of this book written in 1880, is that; and I hate to even say it…but it sought a… plot. Holding the book upside down I shook it as best I can hoping the words trying to build some kind of plot would fall out and away. They remained in and left major events not supported but slipped in to create an urgent feel of surprise? A rushing to leave me gazing at this, up to now beautifully structured tale, bulging and stuffed at points; a disheveled sack. Fortunately Jacobsen realized what he had done, how he forced themes to unnecessarily arise against their will. Resettling his papers, inking his pen, he wrote an ending, for me a wise and breathtaking ending, that tied the book together.
So, then I thought in terms of a GR war of acrobatics. This heralded book slipped below the 5 star rating into some fractionalized algebraic equation tottering between a 4 and 5 star rating. Getting out my slide-rule; not that I know what to do with it and the last time I tried I injured myself, realized the sum total of historic success minus the craven need for a plot and emphasis on bleating out the essential themes, still left the sum total over 5. I rechecked all equations and measurements to find that the actual rating was a 5.2/5. This confirms that this is essential reading. Also part of the extra .2 is that it is an entertaining and enjoyable read.
September 29, 2016
Jacobsen was, for Rainer Maria Rilke, one of two "inexhaustible" masters he revered. (The other was Rodin.) Rilke noted that "every time I want to go on, I find the next, the next higher, the approaching stage of my growth sketched out and already created in [Jacobsen's works and letters]." Both Jacobsen and Rodin "have that penetrating, devoted observation of nature, both have the power to transform what they have seen into reality enhanced a thousandfold." Time to re-read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, apparently.
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November 6, 2012At times, you're reading Niels Lyhne, and you're caught up in the romanticism of it-- the unconsummatable romances, the damaged-soul artist-hero, and the lush, hypotactical descriptions of the natural world. But what Jacobsen effects is something far subtler, with one eye winking at a dawning modernism.
Let's start with those descriptions. Baroque in form, precise in biology, they seem like they would be perfectly at home in the weird tales of Lovecraft or the morose ponderings of Sebald. They are post-romantic, and stand comfortably alongside the works of Kleist in their defiance of categorization.
And there is, of course, Lyhne's profound and deeply humanistic atheism. That dear old dickhead C. Hitchens was an admirer of the novel, and it makes total sense. Unlike other writers of the era-- my beloved Russians, especially-- Jacobsen feels no need to reconcile his hero with a greater being. Rather, he has the courage to die alone. Niels Lyhne's death could be read as follows:
Shit happens, bitch.
And that's pretty cool.
Let's start with those descriptions. Baroque in form, precise in biology, they seem like they would be perfectly at home in the weird tales of Lovecraft or the morose ponderings of Sebald. They are post-romantic, and stand comfortably alongside the works of Kleist in their defiance of categorization.
And there is, of course, Lyhne's profound and deeply humanistic atheism. That dear old dickhead C. Hitchens was an admirer of the novel, and it makes total sense. Unlike other writers of the era-- my beloved Russians, especially-- Jacobsen feels no need to reconcile his hero with a greater being. Rather, he has the courage to die alone. Niels Lyhne's death could be read as follows:
Shit happens, bitch.
And that's pretty cool.
June 14, 2017
comincia leggero poi esplode nel capolavoro. Impressionante vedere quanto Mann ha preso da qua.
May 30, 2015
«Era stanco di se stesso, dei suoi freddi pensieri e dei suoi sogni. La vita un poema! Non quando si passa il tempo a poetare sulla vita invece di viverla. Com’era priva di contenuto, vuota, vuota, vuota! Ah, quel continuo andare a caccia di se stesso, spiando scaltramente le proprie impronte, in un eterno girare in tondo; quell’apparente tuffarsi nel fiume della vita, e intanto starsene seduto a gettar l’amo, aspettando di pescare se stesso sotto chissà quale travestimento! Ah, se solo si fosse decisa a venire finalmente – la vita, l’amore, la passione – così che smettesse di farvi sopra della poesia, per lasciare che fosse la vita stessa a farsi poesia con lui».
È una di quelle rare occasioni in cui credo di aver poco da aggiungere alla citazione iniziale, se non questo: mai come leggendo Niels Lyhne mi sono resa conto che in un romanzo dell’800 si può trovare tutto quel che cerchiamo, risposte a domande che non abbiamo mai osato formulare, sfumature di sentimento per le quali non siamo riusciti a trovare una corrispondenza verbale. Jacobsen, come molti colleghi del secolo, sembra possedere quella conoscenza della natura umana che ce lo rende estremamente caro e che, allo stesso tempo, lo allontana inesorabilmente da noi, figli di due secoli di dubbio e di rifiuto della conoscenza.
Niels, protagonista del romanzo, ha la grazia di un personaggio di Čechov: animato da una grandissima fame di vita, non riesce tuttavia a compiere il passo di vivere. La sua esistenza si svolge in un interminabile sogno: sogna l’amore – e non lo raggiunge che per istanti fugaci; sogna di essere poeta – ma non sente mai arrivato il momento di offrire al mondo la propria poesia. Così nell’attesa vediamo svolgersi la sua vita, vuota, sempre più vuota, coerentemente con la fede atea e nichilista che lo muove. Una rosa di delicatissimi personaggi gli fa da contorno: Bartholine, madre di Niels («In mezzo a tutta quella bellezza lei rimaneva con il suo inappagato desiderio di bellezza in cuore»); Erik, l’artista che nel rumore del mondo perde la sua musa; la signora Boye; Fennimore. Nel tratteggiare i personaggi femminili Jacobsen dà il meglio di sé, dimostrando una rara e stupefacente capacità di penetrazione, che apre nell’animo grandi squarci di chiaroveggenza.
Se volessimo trovare un tema, dovremmo dire che Niels Lyhne è il romanzo della «nostalgia della vita: non di una sua forma particolare e determinata di cui si lamenti la mancanza, ma della vita in sé, come se essa stessa fosse assente» (Claudio Magris). Per questo non può che trattarsi di un libro doloroso, amaro, impietosamente pessimista, ove non è prevista alcuna forma di catarsi. Conoscersi non salva.
È una di quelle rare occasioni in cui credo di aver poco da aggiungere alla citazione iniziale, se non questo: mai come leggendo Niels Lyhne mi sono resa conto che in un romanzo dell’800 si può trovare tutto quel che cerchiamo, risposte a domande che non abbiamo mai osato formulare, sfumature di sentimento per le quali non siamo riusciti a trovare una corrispondenza verbale. Jacobsen, come molti colleghi del secolo, sembra possedere quella conoscenza della natura umana che ce lo rende estremamente caro e che, allo stesso tempo, lo allontana inesorabilmente da noi, figli di due secoli di dubbio e di rifiuto della conoscenza.
Niels, protagonista del romanzo, ha la grazia di un personaggio di Čechov: animato da una grandissima fame di vita, non riesce tuttavia a compiere il passo di vivere. La sua esistenza si svolge in un interminabile sogno: sogna l’amore – e non lo raggiunge che per istanti fugaci; sogna di essere poeta – ma non sente mai arrivato il momento di offrire al mondo la propria poesia. Così nell’attesa vediamo svolgersi la sua vita, vuota, sempre più vuota, coerentemente con la fede atea e nichilista che lo muove. Una rosa di delicatissimi personaggi gli fa da contorno: Bartholine, madre di Niels («In mezzo a tutta quella bellezza lei rimaneva con il suo inappagato desiderio di bellezza in cuore»); Erik, l’artista che nel rumore del mondo perde la sua musa; la signora Boye; Fennimore. Nel tratteggiare i personaggi femminili Jacobsen dà il meglio di sé, dimostrando una rara e stupefacente capacità di penetrazione, che apre nell’animo grandi squarci di chiaroveggenza.
Se volessimo trovare un tema, dovremmo dire che Niels Lyhne è il romanzo della «nostalgia della vita: non di una sua forma particolare e determinata di cui si lamenti la mancanza, ma della vita in sé, come se essa stessa fosse assente» (Claudio Magris). Per questo non può che trattarsi di un libro doloroso, amaro, impietosamente pessimista, ove non è prevista alcuna forma di catarsi. Conoscersi non salva.
July 24, 2018
4.5
REVIEW IN ENGLISH
This novel was a recommendation by M. a dear person of mine that really loved it. I had never read a danish author before so I was eager to read it.
Niels Lyhne is a young Danish man from a rural family. We get to know about him before he was even born, first with his parents and how was their relationship, then we follow him from childhood to adulthood. As time passes, we are living things with him: his first love, his disappointments, his joys, his sorrows, his friendships and his dreams of being a poet. We also live closely his observations of the world. A kind of coming of age in the second half of the 19th century.
Published in 1880, German poet Reiner Maria Rilke recommended it (this was in Letters to a young poet, another great book that M. recommended to me). Niels is a young man who observes, who tries to live and appreciate the world in order to reflect it in his poetry. But things will not be easy and as hapiness will come also the deep sadness will be present in many moments of his life.
Undoubtedly, naturalism and romanticism are very present in Jacobsen's writing and scenery. His writing has high beauty and detail, we have long passages of Lhyne's reflections on what is happening to him. I was very surprised by his personality, his deep atheism and the way of certain dialogues and scenes can leave you breathless. These are undoubtedly the great moments of the novel, in which there are dialogues of great female characters that are charged with value that reinforce the equality between women and men, as human beings.
Although the novel has moments that it can get quite dense, this is compensated with brilliant scenes beautifully written. No doubt everything that happens to Niels is a life full of suffering and learning and however things go, until the last moment, he stands firm in his convictions. The writing is very beautiful and I can say that it has passages that are worth re-reading and returning to them from time to time.
In conclusion, I can recommend Niels Lyhne for everything it represents. Admired by Stefan Sweig (another of my favorite writers), It's a novel that is well worth reading and I feel that you can find something more in a reread, something that I will certainly do. I feel that my review is vague and does not do the book justice, but I hope it will make you go read it soon.
*******************
RESEÑA EN ESPAÑOL
Esta novela fue una recomendación de mi queridísimo M. que es una persona que también le gusta mucho leer y me lo recomendó encarecidamente, ya que era una novela que le había conquistado. No había leído nunca a algún autor danés y me lancé de cabeza a ver qué me encontraba.
Niels Lyhne es un joven danés de una familia del campo. Lo conocemos incluso antes de nacer, primero con sus padres y como fue su relación, luego seguimos sus pasos desde la niñez hasta la adultez. A medida que pasa el tiempo vamos viviendo cosas con él: su primer amor, sus decepciones, sus alegrías, sus tristezas, sus amistades y sus sueños de ser un poeta. También vivimos de cerca su observación de mundo y sus reflexiones. Una especie de coming of age en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.
Crédito: kordi_vahle
Es complejo contar exactamente de qué trata la historia. Publicado en 1880, el poeta alemán Reiner María Rilke lo recomendó mucho (esto fue en Cartas a un joven poeta, que lo reseñé hace poco y también fue una recomendación de chéri M. ) Niels es un joven que observa, que trata de vivir y apreciar el mundo para poder reflejarlo en su poesía. Pero las cosas no serán fáciles y así como alegrías llegarán a su vida también la profunda tristeza estará presente en muchos momentos de su vida.
Sin duda el naturalismo y el romanticismo impregnan la obra de Jacobsen. Su escritura tiene una belleza y un detalle bastante altos, en los que tenemos largos pasajes sobre las reflexiones de Lhyne sobre lo que le va aconteciendo. Me ha sorprendido mucho su forma de pensar, su profundo ateísmo y el nivel con el que ciertos diálogos pueden dejarte sin aliento. Esto son sin duda los grandes momentos de la novela, en los que hay diálogos de personajes femeninos cargados de valor y que refuerzan la igualdad entre mujeres y hombres, todos como seres humanos.
Si bien la novela tienen momentos que se puede tornar bastante densa, es compensado con escenas brillantes y llevadas maravillosamente. Sin duda todo lo que sucede con Niels es una vida de sufrimientos y aprendizajes y por más mal que le vayan las cosas, hasta el último momento el se mantiene firme en sus convicciones. La escritura es muy bella y puedo afirmar que tiene pasajes que vale mucho la pena releer y regresar a ellos de cuando en cuando.
En conclusión, puedo recomendar Niels Lyhne por todo lo que puede representar. Admirada por Stefan Sweig (otro de mis escritores preferidos), es una novela que vale mucho la pena leer y siento que se puede encontrar algo más en una relectura, que sin duda haré. Siento que mi reseña es vaga y no le hace justicia, pero espero les sirva para acercarse a él.
REVIEW IN ENGLISH
This novel was a recommendation by M. a dear person of mine that really loved it. I had never read a danish author before so I was eager to read it.
Niels Lyhne is a young Danish man from a rural family. We get to know about him before he was even born, first with his parents and how was their relationship, then we follow him from childhood to adulthood. As time passes, we are living things with him: his first love, his disappointments, his joys, his sorrows, his friendships and his dreams of being a poet. We also live closely his observations of the world. A kind of coming of age in the second half of the 19th century.
Published in 1880, German poet Reiner Maria Rilke recommended it (this was in Letters to a young poet, another great book that M. recommended to me). Niels is a young man who observes, who tries to live and appreciate the world in order to reflect it in his poetry. But things will not be easy and as hapiness will come also the deep sadness will be present in many moments of his life.
Undoubtedly, naturalism and romanticism are very present in Jacobsen's writing and scenery. His writing has high beauty and detail, we have long passages of Lhyne's reflections on what is happening to him. I was very surprised by his personality, his deep atheism and the way of certain dialogues and scenes can leave you breathless. These are undoubtedly the great moments of the novel, in which there are dialogues of great female characters that are charged with value that reinforce the equality between women and men, as human beings.
Although the novel has moments that it can get quite dense, this is compensated with brilliant scenes beautifully written. No doubt everything that happens to Niels is a life full of suffering and learning and however things go, until the last moment, he stands firm in his convictions. The writing is very beautiful and I can say that it has passages that are worth re-reading and returning to them from time to time.
In conclusion, I can recommend Niels Lyhne for everything it represents. Admired by Stefan Sweig (another of my favorite writers), It's a novel that is well worth reading and I feel that you can find something more in a reread, something that I will certainly do. I feel that my review is vague and does not do the book justice, but I hope it will make you go read it soon.
*******************
RESEÑA EN ESPAÑOL
Esta novela fue una recomendación de mi queridísimo M. que es una persona que también le gusta mucho leer y me lo recomendó encarecidamente, ya que era una novela que le había conquistado. No había leído nunca a algún autor danés y me lancé de cabeza a ver qué me encontraba.
Niels Lyhne es un joven danés de una familia del campo. Lo conocemos incluso antes de nacer, primero con sus padres y como fue su relación, luego seguimos sus pasos desde la niñez hasta la adultez. A medida que pasa el tiempo vamos viviendo cosas con él: su primer amor, sus decepciones, sus alegrías, sus tristezas, sus amistades y sus sueños de ser un poeta. También vivimos de cerca su observación de mundo y sus reflexiones. Una especie de coming of age en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.
Crédito: kordi_vahle
Es complejo contar exactamente de qué trata la historia. Publicado en 1880, el poeta alemán Reiner María Rilke lo recomendó mucho (esto fue en Cartas a un joven poeta, que lo reseñé hace poco y también fue una recomendación de chéri M. ) Niels es un joven que observa, que trata de vivir y apreciar el mundo para poder reflejarlo en su poesía. Pero las cosas no serán fáciles y así como alegrías llegarán a su vida también la profunda tristeza estará presente en muchos momentos de su vida.
Sin duda el naturalismo y el romanticismo impregnan la obra de Jacobsen. Su escritura tiene una belleza y un detalle bastante altos, en los que tenemos largos pasajes sobre las reflexiones de Lhyne sobre lo que le va aconteciendo. Me ha sorprendido mucho su forma de pensar, su profundo ateísmo y el nivel con el que ciertos diálogos pueden dejarte sin aliento. Esto son sin duda los grandes momentos de la novela, en los que hay diálogos de personajes femeninos cargados de valor y que refuerzan la igualdad entre mujeres y hombres, todos como seres humanos.
Si bien la novela tienen momentos que se puede tornar bastante densa, es compensado con escenas brillantes y llevadas maravillosamente. Sin duda todo lo que sucede con Niels es una vida de sufrimientos y aprendizajes y por más mal que le vayan las cosas, hasta el último momento el se mantiene firme en sus convicciones. La escritura es muy bella y puedo afirmar que tiene pasajes que vale mucho la pena releer y regresar a ellos de cuando en cuando.
En conclusión, puedo recomendar Niels Lyhne por todo lo que puede representar. Admirada por Stefan Sweig (otro de mis escritores preferidos), es una novela que vale mucho la pena leer y siento que se puede encontrar algo más en una relectura, que sin duda haré. Siento que mi reseña es vaga y no le hace justicia, pero espero les sirva para acercarse a él.
November 29, 2016
I decided to read ‘Niels Lyhne’ as Rilke recommended it very highly in Letters to a Young Poet. He went into raptures about it, actually. Thus it surprised me to find the novel initially rather stolid and difficult to get into. I wonder if this might have something to do with the translation I read? I got a copy from the university library that was published in 1920 and translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen. The style of the translation, which may accurately reflect the original Danish for all I know, is extraordinarily melodramatic to the point of incoherence, like a Victorian moral fable.
The novel is a biography of the eponymous hero’s disappointments and tragedies. Rather surprisingly, it is also a paean to atheism, which seems incongruous with the traditional, fussy style. The most powerful passages focussed on this aspect of Lyhne’s character, such as:
He continues in this vein for some while. I definitely enjoyed the second half of Niels Lyhne’s story more than the first, as he became a somewhat more sympathetic and definitely more convincing character. I also liked the wonderfully-named Fennimore, especially her rant in chapter eleven, which included the comment:
Other than this interlude, the roles played by female characters are wearyingly submissive, despite the characters themselves seeming interesting. For the most part I was puzzled by this novel. Although there are some lovely passages, I had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t reading the same book as Rilke did. Perhaps it was the translation, or perhaps it was me.
The novel is a biography of the eponymous hero’s disappointments and tragedies. Rather surprisingly, it is also a paean to atheism, which seems incongruous with the traditional, fussy style. The most powerful passages focussed on this aspect of Lyhne’s character, such as:
“There is no God, and man is his prophet,” replied Lyhne bitterly and rather sadly.
“Exactly,” scoffed Hjerrild. “After all, atheism is unspeakably tame. Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity’s last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can’t see it.”
“But don’t you see,” exclaimed Niels Lyhne, “that on that day when men are free to exult and say: ‘There is no God!’ on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not until then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye…”
He continues in this vein for some while. I definitely enjoyed the second half of Niels Lyhne’s story more than the first, as he became a somewhat more sympathetic and definitely more convincing character. I also liked the wonderfully-named Fennimore, especially her rant in chapter eleven, which included the comment:
”You may be sure that women are not the ethereal creatures many a good youth fancies; they are really no more delicate than men and not very different from them. Take my word for it, there has been some filthy clay used in the shaping of them both.”
Other than this interlude, the roles played by female characters are wearyingly submissive, despite the characters themselves seeming interesting. For the most part I was puzzled by this novel. Although there are some lovely passages, I had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t reading the same book as Rilke did. Perhaps it was the translation, or perhaps it was me.
June 27, 2015
Written during the naturalism movement...it was a nightmare to read. Almost no dialogue but overly detailed descriptions and useless musings. I had to fight sleep all the damn time.
A whiny character who can't make up his damn mind, lots of pointless occurances, somewhat ridiculous drama.
Almost as bad as the "Metamorphosis" by Kafka. Almost.
A whiny character who can't make up his damn mind, lots of pointless occurances, somewhat ridiculous drama.
Almost as bad as the "Metamorphosis" by Kafka. Almost.
July 21, 2024
Senti desde as primeiras páginas que seria uma leitura especial; volvido um terço do livro, que seria um dos melhores do ano; a meio, estava completamente rendido a algumas das mais belas páginas de literatura que li em toda a minha vida; no final, com a certeza de ter lido uma das melhores obras de sempre, dentro da minha pequena amostra. Escrita soberba, viagem existencial esmagadora, simplesmente perfeito! Parabéns à editora Antígona por esta edição, sempre a surpreender os seus fiéis leitores.
August 12, 2021
Hiobowa historia.
Nie wiem, skąd wziąłem pomysł, żeby tę książkę przeczytać.... na pewno pojawiła się gdzieś w moich niedawnych lekturach, być może wśród tytułów wymienianych w O sztuce czytania i pisania.
Naprawdę fajnie przeczytać czasem trochę dobrego modernizmu.
Jest to historia o człowieku, któremu los bezustannie rzucał kłody pod nogi. Co się zakochał, to w niewłaściwej kobiecie; co sobie zaplanował, w kategoriach idei czy rozwoju, to los plany te obracał w niwecz. Chciał zostać poetą, był wyznawcą nowoczesnych idei, a życie co rusz dawało mu w kość. No i wszyscy bliscy mu umierali, gdy tylko się do nich emocjonalnie zbliżał. Myślę, że nie będzie szczególnym spoilerem, jeżeli dodam, że na końcu on też umarł; dodatkowo pełen wątpliwości, czy Bóg przyjmie go na swoje łono, bo nie był pewien, czy istnieje. Nie wierzył w Boga, wierzył w poezję; ale poezja nie uchroniła go od zbłąkanej kuli na polu bitwy.
Jak by ironicznie nie zabrzmiał ten opis, to jest dobra i piękna, chociaż bardzo smutna powieść. Narracja jest wartka, chociaż nie unika dygresji filozoficzno-przyrodniczych; rysy psychologiczne są barwne i wiarygodne. Jest w tej powieści wszystko to co lubi się (ja lubię) w dobrej literaturze końca XIX wieku. Czuć w niej trochę Dostojewskiego.
Takie powieści czyta się z przyjemnością także z powodu języka: chodzi o pewien rodzaj literackiego gadulstwa, który tkwi w opisach dylematów bohaterów czy nawet w opisach przyrody; mimo wielości słów, ma się wrażenie, że obcuje się z pięknym językiem i to jest fajne. Tłumaczenie z 1925 roku trąci co prawdą trochę myszką (nadużywanie czasu zaprzeszłego), ale widać w nim rękę profesjonalnej literatki (Maria Dąbrowska).
Nie wiem, skąd wziąłem pomysł, żeby tę książkę przeczytać.... na pewno pojawiła się gdzieś w moich niedawnych lekturach, być może wśród tytułów wymienianych w O sztuce czytania i pisania.
Naprawdę fajnie przeczytać czasem trochę dobrego modernizmu.
Jest to historia o człowieku, któremu los bezustannie rzucał kłody pod nogi. Co się zakochał, to w niewłaściwej kobiecie; co sobie zaplanował, w kategoriach idei czy rozwoju, to los plany te obracał w niwecz. Chciał zostać poetą, był wyznawcą nowoczesnych idei, a życie co rusz dawało mu w kość. No i wszyscy bliscy mu umierali, gdy tylko się do nich emocjonalnie zbliżał. Myślę, że nie będzie szczególnym spoilerem, jeżeli dodam, że na końcu on też umarł; dodatkowo pełen wątpliwości, czy Bóg przyjmie go na swoje łono, bo nie był pewien, czy istnieje. Nie wierzył w Boga, wierzył w poezję; ale poezja nie uchroniła go od zbłąkanej kuli na polu bitwy.
Jak by ironicznie nie zabrzmiał ten opis, to jest dobra i piękna, chociaż bardzo smutna powieść. Narracja jest wartka, chociaż nie unika dygresji filozoficzno-przyrodniczych; rysy psychologiczne są barwne i wiarygodne. Jest w tej powieści wszystko to co lubi się (ja lubię) w dobrej literaturze końca XIX wieku. Czuć w niej trochę Dostojewskiego.
Takie powieści czyta się z przyjemnością także z powodu języka: chodzi o pewien rodzaj literackiego gadulstwa, który tkwi w opisach dylematów bohaterów czy nawet w opisach przyrody; mimo wielości słów, ma się wrażenie, że obcuje się z pięknym językiem i to jest fajne. Tłumaczenie z 1925 roku trąci co prawdą trochę myszką (nadużywanie czasu zaprzeszłego), ale widać w nim rękę profesjonalnej literatki (Maria Dąbrowska).
January 31, 2018
Hated it during the whole reading. Once finished, I found it not that bad...
May 6, 2019
J. P. Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne was a very positive surprise. His nature descriptions are unique, perhaps matched only by those of Turgenev, by whom he was influenced. To a degree Jacobsen even surpasses Turgenev in the way his delineations of nature are so masterly integrated into the book’s thematic. I was glad to be able to read this in the original Danish, as many of those outstanding passages must be really hard to translate (and even to my native Norwegian.) I read in the very useful afterword in this edition that the particular work by Turgenev that Jacobsen was influenced by for this book was Fathers and Sons, but of course, by combining both of the main characters of that book into one, the result is something entirely different.
A scientist by education, Jacobsen translated Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man to Danish in the early 1870's and also introduced Darwin to the larger public through magazine articles before publishing his first novel in 1876. Writing about "bad" freethinkers ("daarlige Fritænkere") in Niels Lyhne (1880), Jacobsen was in a way being a "bad" naturalist, and the leading Danish critic Georg Brandes didn’t really like the book all that much, perhaps mainly because it might throw a bad light on the contemporary intellectual movement. Though he did (rightly) admire Jacobsen's style of writing and his mastery of the Danish language, and as for 'provoking debate' ("sætte Problemer under Debat") which was Brandes' main slogan, Niels Lyhne surely qualified eminently. The novel starts out in an almost classic naturalistic vein, but soon develops into something quite other than that, which can perhaps be described as impressionistic realism/naturalism. By focusing on particular stages in the life and development of the protagonist, Jacobsen sticks tightly to his theme of dreams versus reality, religion versus reason, and a young man’s struggles to get a firm grasp on his life and find his place within it. So, this is a Bildungsroman of sorts, but being a naturalist Bildungsroman, the protagonist doesn't reach the big moment of clarity or find his bourgeois vocation, he is rather slowly grinded down by life as he sheds illusion after illusion and as he is moved along by unconscious drives and urges, both his own and those of others. Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend that he was "profoundly moved" by the novel, and Henrik Ibsen thought it among the very finest contemporary contributions in its field. Jacobsen has also been lauded by great writers like Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse and James Joyce. They weren’t wrong.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
A scientist by education, Jacobsen translated Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man to Danish in the early 1870's and also introduced Darwin to the larger public through magazine articles before publishing his first novel in 1876. Writing about "bad" freethinkers ("daarlige Fritænkere") in Niels Lyhne (1880), Jacobsen was in a way being a "bad" naturalist, and the leading Danish critic Georg Brandes didn’t really like the book all that much, perhaps mainly because it might throw a bad light on the contemporary intellectual movement. Though he did (rightly) admire Jacobsen's style of writing and his mastery of the Danish language, and as for 'provoking debate' ("sætte Problemer under Debat") which was Brandes' main slogan, Niels Lyhne surely qualified eminently. The novel starts out in an almost classic naturalistic vein, but soon develops into something quite other than that, which can perhaps be described as impressionistic realism/naturalism. By focusing on particular stages in the life and development of the protagonist, Jacobsen sticks tightly to his theme of dreams versus reality, religion versus reason, and a young man’s struggles to get a firm grasp on his life and find his place within it. So, this is a Bildungsroman of sorts, but being a naturalist Bildungsroman, the protagonist doesn't reach the big moment of clarity or find his bourgeois vocation, he is rather slowly grinded down by life as he sheds illusion after illusion and as he is moved along by unconscious drives and urges, both his own and those of others. Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend that he was "profoundly moved" by the novel, and Henrik Ibsen thought it among the very finest contemporary contributions in its field. Jacobsen has also been lauded by great writers like Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse and James Joyce. They weren’t wrong.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
September 11, 2018
This 1880 Danish novel was once immensely influential: it and its author were cited or praised by Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and Rainer Maria Rilke. That is reason enough to read it for those interested in literary history, but it is also a superb psychological portrait of a failed artist, written in a style marked by startling imagery and precise emotional analysis (as conveyed in Tiina Nunnally's 1990 translation published by Penguin Classics).
There are a number of historical -isms under which we could categorize Niels Lyhne. In its ruthless portrayal of middle-class life as actually lived behind the mask of bourgeois respectability, it resembles the disillusioning realism of mid-to-late 19th-century writers like Flaubert, Chekhov, and Jacobsen's fellow Scandinavian radical, Ibsen. In its emphasis on the frail body and biological processes leading toward death, coupled with its concluding atheist rhetoric, it is a work of naturalism akin to that of Hardy, Zola, or Crane. In its plotless evocation of often morbid psychological states and in its focus on the artist as martyr to an uncomprehending society, it is a quintessential proto-modenist psychological novel like those of Dostoevsky, Huysmans, or Hamsun.
Such attempts at narrow categorization, though, would miss the larger issue: Jacobsen's novel reflects and hastens the collapse, across a whole range of domains from geology to psychology, of prior forms of order and faith. Jacobsen, who translated Darwin into Danish and who died young (in 1885) after a long struggle with tuberculosis, tells the story of a character who tries to live, to love, and to make art when all the ideals that empowered prior generations, from Christianity in religion to Romanticism in literature, have been discredited by the ongoing revelation that a human being is only another animal.
Niels Lyhne, in keeping with a Darwinian concern for genealogy, begins with the eponymous hero's parentage: a passionately idealistic mother and a far more prosaic businessman-farmer of a father. These two parents pull young Niels in two different directions, neither of which will be able to appease his simultaneous need to understanding and to transcend reality. The author, unlike the hero, gets to have it both ways, though: he gratifies his idealism by narrating his characters' perceptions of natural beauty and aesthetic or erotic rapture, even as, in so doing, he also provides a precise scientific description of the psyche:
The novel follows Niels from his childhood to the premature end of his life; it is organized around his major relationships, mainly with a series of idealized women along with male friends who act as de-idealizing counterweights and, sometimes, erotic rivals.
While Jacobsen's prose often consists of the abstract notation of psychological states, he is also a writer of memorably vivid and sensory erotic scenes that convey the overwhelming sensuality of even seemingly trivial moments, as here with Niels encounters his older cousin, Edele, who comes to stay with the family shortly before her untimely death from tuberculosis, the first of many such early deaths in the story:
Edele's death brings Niels to his first rebellion against God, the cruel deity who took such a young and beautiful life:
His next major relationship is to his an older boy named Erik, another cousin, with whom he enjoys idyllic boyhood escapades that provide a later model of intelligent, realistic play rather than just dreaming fantasy. This relationship, precisely because it is devoid of the erotic as such, proves more satisfying, even if it does not end more happily, than Niels's relationships with women:
When the seemingly un-artistic Erik goes to Copenhagen to pursue sculpture, Niels follows and falls in with the urban demimonde, reflecting on the pleasures and sorrows of bohemia. There he has an abortive love affair with an older and more experienced widow, Fru Boye. Though described as child-like (all Niels's love interests are both child-like and resemble his mother in their passionate iconoclasm—obviously a case for Jacobsen's contemporary Freud), Fru Boye speaks eloquently against the lingering Romanticism of Niels's artist friends. She upholds instead the earthly complexity of Shakespeare:
Sounding like one of Ibsen's feminist heroines, Fru Boye is also the first to tell Niels that his idealization of women, in which we might have thought Jacobsen's lyrical prose to be complicit, is oppressive and destructive:
After Niels's affair with Fru Boye ends with her own withdrawal to the financial and social safety of bourgeois domesticity, Niels loses his beloved mother, whose impassioned pursuit of the ideal started it all. Fittingly, she dies amid the novel's most visionary and redemptive writing, with an intermittent vision of nature as unity:
Then Niels and Erik both fall in love with the same woman, a seemingly guileless teenager named Fennimore. Her choice of Erik, her regret for that choice, and her consequent disastrous relationship with Niels brings the novel to its violent emotional climax, and with this climax we realize that every relationship in this narrative will end with either the death of a disappointed rebel or the chastened return of a disappointed rebel to the fold of normative society. Or both at once, as the novel's conclusion proves: Niels at last seemingly finds happiness with another young woman. They marry, have a child, and together espouse atheism and humanism ("There is no God and the human being is His prophet," Niels had earlier affirmed), so much so that it shocks their neighbors. Yet at the now-familiar approach of inexorable premature death, can doubt win out over faith? The answer varies by dying character, but Niels himself ends a lonely hero of integrity confronting death in fidelity to the anti-ideal that there is no God, no transcendence, no salvation.
That summation and those excerpts should indicate why the novel proved so influential. It is a very distinguished entrant in a line of novels running from Melville's Pierre and Flaubert's Sentimental Education to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and Mann's Magic Mountain , novels in which the budding hero of the bildungsroman and the nascent artist of the künstlerroman fail to develop into good citizens or great artists, crushed as they are by a cruel society and an uncaring cosmos. Niels Lyhne had its greatest impact on American literature through its influence on the half-Danish Nella Larsen, whose great novella of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand , extends this doleful narrative pattern by applying it to a black woman rather than to a white man, showing that the existential dilemma may be the same, but that it manifests itself differently due to social circumstance and identity.
But we should not be as careless as the Twitterati sometimes are when, in unwitting imitation of the white supremacists they claim to fight, they fling around the word "white" so much that they efface variations and hierarchies within the non-unity that was and is Europe. What made Scandinavian, Russian, and Irish literature so potent and influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (like Latin American literature in the late 20th century) was precisely its coming from Europe's periphery, from marginal or dominated nations able to look with a critical eye on both the provincial traditions they were struggling to transcend and the metropolitan modernity that often felt forced from above. Niels Lyhne participates in this modernist revolt from the European fringe, so it is no wonder the novel would inspire artists on the fringes of other polities or collectives.
Niels Lyhne is also admittedly flawed. As Jacobsen's narrative method is mainly descriptive rather than dramatic, it often lacks tension, and its characters' complexity tends to be abstractly asserted rather than vividly depicted. Georg Lukács, in his Theory of the Novel, faulted the book on these grounds. Lukács blames the hero's alienation from society for the novel's inability to portray reality in the round:
Lukács's judgment is not wrong exactly, but, with his characteristic Hegelian censure of the anti-social, he also misses the point, as he so often does when discussing naturalism and modernism. Niels Lyhne may not give us social reality in three dimensions, but it gives us what can be more rewarding to the individual reader: invaluable and eloquent testimony to the feelings of despair, loneliness, and nihilism that our disillusioning world so often provokes in us.
There are a number of historical -isms under which we could categorize Niels Lyhne. In its ruthless portrayal of middle-class life as actually lived behind the mask of bourgeois respectability, it resembles the disillusioning realism of mid-to-late 19th-century writers like Flaubert, Chekhov, and Jacobsen's fellow Scandinavian radical, Ibsen. In its emphasis on the frail body and biological processes leading toward death, coupled with its concluding atheist rhetoric, it is a work of naturalism akin to that of Hardy, Zola, or Crane. In its plotless evocation of often morbid psychological states and in its focus on the artist as martyr to an uncomprehending society, it is a quintessential proto-modenist psychological novel like those of Dostoevsky, Huysmans, or Hamsun.
Such attempts at narrow categorization, though, would miss the larger issue: Jacobsen's novel reflects and hastens the collapse, across a whole range of domains from geology to psychology, of prior forms of order and faith. Jacobsen, who translated Darwin into Danish and who died young (in 1885) after a long struggle with tuberculosis, tells the story of a character who tries to live, to love, and to make art when all the ideals that empowered prior generations, from Christianity in religion to Romanticism in literature, have been discredited by the ongoing revelation that a human being is only another animal.
Niels Lyhne, in keeping with a Darwinian concern for genealogy, begins with the eponymous hero's parentage: a passionately idealistic mother and a far more prosaic businessman-farmer of a father. These two parents pull young Niels in two different directions, neither of which will be able to appease his simultaneous need to understanding and to transcend reality. The author, unlike the hero, gets to have it both ways, though: he gratifies his idealism by narrating his characters' perceptions of natural beauty and aesthetic or erotic rapture, even as, in so doing, he also provides a precise scientific description of the psyche:
Of course this was not as clear and definite in [Niels's] childish consciousness as words can express it, but it was all there, unfinished, unborn, in a vague and intangible fetal form. It was like the strange vegetation of the lake bottom, seen through milky ice. Break up the ice or pull what is dimly alive out into the light of words, and the same thing happens—what can now be seen and grasped is, in its clarity, no longer the obscurity that it was.
The novel follows Niels from his childhood to the premature end of his life; it is organized around his major relationships, mainly with a series of idealized women along with male friends who act as de-idealizing counterweights and, sometimes, erotic rivals.
While Jacobsen's prose often consists of the abstract notation of psychological states, he is also a writer of memorably vivid and sensory erotic scenes that convey the overwhelming sensuality of even seemingly trivial moments, as here with Niels encounters his older cousin, Edele, who comes to stay with the family shortly before her untimely death from tuberculosis, the first of many such early deaths in the story:
"Give me that over there," she said, pointing to a red bottle lying on a crumpled handkerchief by her feet.
Niels went over to it; he was beet-red, and as he bent over those matte-white, gently curving legs and those long, narrow feet that had something of a hand's intelligence in their finely cradled contours, he felt quite faint; when, at the same moment, the tip of one foot curled downward with a sudden movement, he was just about to collapse.
Edele's death brings Niels to his first rebellion against God, the cruel deity who took such a young and beautiful life:
He thought with the mind of the conquered, felt with the heart of the defeated, and he understood that if what wins is good, what surrenders is not necessarily bad; and so he took sides, said that his side was better, felt that it was greater, and called the victorious force tyrannical and violent.
His next major relationship is to his an older boy named Erik, another cousin, with whom he enjoys idyllic boyhood escapades that provide a later model of intelligent, realistic play rather than just dreaming fantasy. This relationship, precisely because it is devoid of the erotic as such, proves more satisfying, even if it does not end more happily, than Niels's relationships with women:
Of all the emotional relationships in life, is there any more delicate, more noble, and more intense than a boy's deep and yet so totally bashful love for another boy?
When the seemingly un-artistic Erik goes to Copenhagen to pursue sculpture, Niels follows and falls in with the urban demimonde, reflecting on the pleasures and sorrows of bohemia. There he has an abortive love affair with an older and more experienced widow, Fru Boye. Though described as child-like (all Niels's love interests are both child-like and resemble his mother in their passionate iconoclasm—obviously a case for Jacobsen's contemporary Freud), Fru Boye speaks eloquently against the lingering Romanticism of Niels's artist friends. She upholds instead the earthly complexity of Shakespeare:
"[G]ood God, why can't we be natural? Oh, I know full well that courage is what's missing. Neither artists nor poets have the courage to to acknowledge human beings for what they are—but Shakespeare did."
Sounding like one of Ibsen's feminist heroines, Fru Boye is also the first to tell Niels that his idealization of women, in which we might have thought Jacobsen's lyrical prose to be complicit, is oppressive and destructive:
"[T]hat adoration, in its fanaticism, is basically tyrannical. We are forced to fit into the man's ideal. Like Cinderella, chop off a heel and snip off a toe! Whatever in us does not match up with his ideal image has to be banished, if not by subjugation then by indifference, by systematic neglect... I call that violence against our nature."
After Niels's affair with Fru Boye ends with her own withdrawal to the financial and social safety of bourgeois domesticity, Niels loses his beloved mother, whose impassioned pursuit of the ideal started it all. Fittingly, she dies amid the novel's most visionary and redemptive writing, with an intermittent vision of nature as unity:
...for that was the time when yellow-lit evening mists hid the Jura Mountains, and the lake, red as a copper mirror with golden flames scalloped by the sun-red glow, seemed to merge with the radiance of the heavens into one vast, brilliant sea of infinity, then once in a great while it was as if her longing were silenced and her soul had found the land that it sought.
Then Niels and Erik both fall in love with the same woman, a seemingly guileless teenager named Fennimore. Her choice of Erik, her regret for that choice, and her consequent disastrous relationship with Niels brings the novel to its violent emotional climax, and with this climax we realize that every relationship in this narrative will end with either the death of a disappointed rebel or the chastened return of a disappointed rebel to the fold of normative society. Or both at once, as the novel's conclusion proves: Niels at last seemingly finds happiness with another young woman. They marry, have a child, and together espouse atheism and humanism ("There is no God and the human being is His prophet," Niels had earlier affirmed), so much so that it shocks their neighbors. Yet at the now-familiar approach of inexorable premature death, can doubt win out over faith? The answer varies by dying character, but Niels himself ends a lonely hero of integrity confronting death in fidelity to the anti-ideal that there is no God, no transcendence, no salvation.
That summation and those excerpts should indicate why the novel proved so influential. It is a very distinguished entrant in a line of novels running from Melville's Pierre and Flaubert's Sentimental Education to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and Mann's Magic Mountain , novels in which the budding hero of the bildungsroman and the nascent artist of the künstlerroman fail to develop into good citizens or great artists, crushed as they are by a cruel society and an uncaring cosmos. Niels Lyhne had its greatest impact on American literature through its influence on the half-Danish Nella Larsen, whose great novella of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand , extends this doleful narrative pattern by applying it to a black woman rather than to a white man, showing that the existential dilemma may be the same, but that it manifests itself differently due to social circumstance and identity.
But we should not be as careless as the Twitterati sometimes are when, in unwitting imitation of the white supremacists they claim to fight, they fling around the word "white" so much that they efface variations and hierarchies within the non-unity that was and is Europe. What made Scandinavian, Russian, and Irish literature so potent and influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (like Latin American literature in the late 20th century) was precisely its coming from Europe's periphery, from marginal or dominated nations able to look with a critical eye on both the provincial traditions they were struggling to transcend and the metropolitan modernity that often felt forced from above. Niels Lyhne participates in this modernist revolt from the European fringe, so it is no wonder the novel would inspire artists on the fringes of other polities or collectives.
Niels Lyhne is also admittedly flawed. As Jacobsen's narrative method is mainly descriptive rather than dramatic, it often lacks tension, and its characters' complexity tends to be abstractly asserted rather than vividly depicted. Georg Lukács, in his Theory of the Novel, faulted the book on these grounds. Lukács blames the hero's alienation from society for the novel's inability to portray reality in the round:
The precondition and the price of this immoderate elevation of the subject is, however, the abandonment of any claim to participate in the shaping of the outside world. [...] Jacobsen's novel of disillusionment, which expresses in wonderful lyrical images the author's melancholy over a world 'in which there's so much that is senselessly exquisite', breaks down and disintegrates completely; and the author's attempt to find a desperate positiveness in Niels Lyhne's heroic atheism, his courageous acceptance of his necessary loneliness, strikes us as an aid brought in from outside the actual work. This hero's life which was meant to become a work of literature and instead is only a poor fragment, is actually transformed into a pile of débris by the form-giving process; the cruelty of disillusionment devalues the lyricism of the moods, but it cannot endow the characters and events with substance or with the gravity of existence. The novel remains a beautiful yet unreal mixture of voluptuousness and bitterness, sorrow and scorn, but not a unity; a series of images and aspects, but not a life totality.
Lukács's judgment is not wrong exactly, but, with his characteristic Hegelian censure of the anti-social, he also misses the point, as he so often does when discussing naturalism and modernism. Niels Lyhne may not give us social reality in three dimensions, but it gives us what can be more rewarding to the individual reader: invaluable and eloquent testimony to the feelings of despair, loneliness, and nihilism that our disillusioning world so often provokes in us.
October 15, 2016
Duvido alguma vez ler tamanho eco, compreensão, interioridade. Foi através de Rilke que conheci esta obra, e foi pelas suas palavras acerca desta que decidi lê-la:
" (...) Niels Lyhne, um livro magnífico e profundo; quando mais o lemos, mais parece que encontramos nele tudo: do cheiro levíssimo da vida ao sabor cheio e grande dos seus frutos mais pesados. Não há nele nada que não tivesse sido entendido, apreendido, vivido, reconhecido nas reverberações vibrantes da memória; nenhuma experiência é demasiado insignificante, e mesmo o acontecimento mais miúdo cresce como um destino, e o destino ele próprio é como um grande e fabuloso tecido, em que cada fio foi conduzido e entrelaçado num outro por mão infinitamente delicada, sendo sustido e reforçado por cem fios mais. (...) " ( Terceira carta a Kappus. Cartas a um jovem poeta)
Não pensei que fosse possível descrever a luz, os raios através das cortinas, a sua dança, e matização das flores. A escrita é belíssima e esculpe o mundo com tamanha vividez e leveza, como se escrevesse com a sua própria visão e tacto, diretamente transmutado em palavras. Pensei que fosse interdita às palavras a apreensão profunda do amor, do espírito, do sonho, da criação, da inocência conspurcada, da descrença, da morte, sob diferentes ângulos, especificidades tão únicas, pequenas, e por isso gigantes ecos no coração humano. Chorei por dentro. E sorri por dentro. Perante o quadro da vida. Sofri a dor de Niels. E do Sr. Bigum. Fennimore. Erik. As derrotas do sonho, da inocência, perante a crueza daquilo que é contra aquilo que um coração poeta erigiu. A poesia lacerada no final do amor e o vazio posterior que se lança ao chão, incompreendido, criança inocente espezinhada e sozinha. Sempre estivemos sozinhos no intervalo breve do amor e no próprio amor afinal?
" Se pensava, porém, nos seres humanos, ofuscava-se-lhe de novo o espírito. Evocou-os um por um e todos passaram por ele e o deixaram só e nenhum ficou para trás. Mas como se ligara a eles, fora leal? Era simplesmente que ele fora mais lento a desprender-se. Não, não era isso. Era a tristeza imensa de uma alma se sentir sempre só. Falsa era toda a fé na fusão duma alma com outra."
E no entanto vivemos. Talvez guardemos junto ao peito a poesia de um único momento, ataviando-o de uma pureza inacessível a outro mundo que não o nosso próprio mundo interior. As lágrimas de Niels são as lágrimas de todos os sensíveis. E é titânico ser humano. Foi o sonho que nos trouxe até aqui, e o deus que no último instante reconciliamos e nos abraça a fragilidade, lava o medo, porque afinal somos só humanos. Como suportaríamos a dor na consciência e em todo o corpo sem bálsamos? E o peso do nosso corpo sem a elevação das asas que anseiam a plenitude da graça e da Beleza pressentida por nós mortais.
Vivemos com uma lágrima-riso cravada na alma. Uns despem-se de quase tudo na dor, outros mantêm os bálsamos - No final de Niels Lyhne, entrevi a noite triste e corajosa de alguém que não abdicou de trair a sua crença mais profunda em nome do conforto. Um punho denso mergulhou no meu coração nas últimas páginas que são as páginas de milhões de humanos, agora e de sempre e para sempre. Mas há ainda um brilho triste por tudo aquilo que foi belo - a infância, a primavera, a inocência, as flores e os campos de aveia. No entanto, vivemos.
" (...) Niels Lyhne, um livro magnífico e profundo; quando mais o lemos, mais parece que encontramos nele tudo: do cheiro levíssimo da vida ao sabor cheio e grande dos seus frutos mais pesados. Não há nele nada que não tivesse sido entendido, apreendido, vivido, reconhecido nas reverberações vibrantes da memória; nenhuma experiência é demasiado insignificante, e mesmo o acontecimento mais miúdo cresce como um destino, e o destino ele próprio é como um grande e fabuloso tecido, em que cada fio foi conduzido e entrelaçado num outro por mão infinitamente delicada, sendo sustido e reforçado por cem fios mais. (...) " ( Terceira carta a Kappus. Cartas a um jovem poeta)
Não pensei que fosse possível descrever a luz, os raios através das cortinas, a sua dança, e matização das flores. A escrita é belíssima e esculpe o mundo com tamanha vividez e leveza, como se escrevesse com a sua própria visão e tacto, diretamente transmutado em palavras. Pensei que fosse interdita às palavras a apreensão profunda do amor, do espírito, do sonho, da criação, da inocência conspurcada, da descrença, da morte, sob diferentes ângulos, especificidades tão únicas, pequenas, e por isso gigantes ecos no coração humano. Chorei por dentro. E sorri por dentro. Perante o quadro da vida. Sofri a dor de Niels. E do Sr. Bigum. Fennimore. Erik. As derrotas do sonho, da inocência, perante a crueza daquilo que é contra aquilo que um coração poeta erigiu. A poesia lacerada no final do amor e o vazio posterior que se lança ao chão, incompreendido, criança inocente espezinhada e sozinha. Sempre estivemos sozinhos no intervalo breve do amor e no próprio amor afinal?
" Se pensava, porém, nos seres humanos, ofuscava-se-lhe de novo o espírito. Evocou-os um por um e todos passaram por ele e o deixaram só e nenhum ficou para trás. Mas como se ligara a eles, fora leal? Era simplesmente que ele fora mais lento a desprender-se. Não, não era isso. Era a tristeza imensa de uma alma se sentir sempre só. Falsa era toda a fé na fusão duma alma com outra."
E no entanto vivemos. Talvez guardemos junto ao peito a poesia de um único momento, ataviando-o de uma pureza inacessível a outro mundo que não o nosso próprio mundo interior. As lágrimas de Niels são as lágrimas de todos os sensíveis. E é titânico ser humano. Foi o sonho que nos trouxe até aqui, e o deus que no último instante reconciliamos e nos abraça a fragilidade, lava o medo, porque afinal somos só humanos. Como suportaríamos a dor na consciência e em todo o corpo sem bálsamos? E o peso do nosso corpo sem a elevação das asas que anseiam a plenitude da graça e da Beleza pressentida por nós mortais.
Vivemos com uma lágrima-riso cravada na alma. Uns despem-se de quase tudo na dor, outros mantêm os bálsamos - No final de Niels Lyhne, entrevi a noite triste e corajosa de alguém que não abdicou de trair a sua crença mais profunda em nome do conforto. Um punho denso mergulhou no meu coração nas últimas páginas que são as páginas de milhões de humanos, agora e de sempre e para sempre. Mas há ainda um brilho triste por tudo aquilo que foi belo - a infância, a primavera, a inocência, as flores e os campos de aveia. No entanto, vivemos.
October 15, 2023
Sono combattuta. Ho dato 4*, perché è senza ombra di dubbio un capolavoro, però forse è un capolavoro nello stile, non dal punto di vista narrativo. Non c'è una trama che ti tiene avvinto: tutto è raccontato dal narratore, spiegato con una certa naïveté che oggi, abituati ai plot magnetici, fa un po' sorridere. In fin dei conti ci sono solo due grandi nodi da sciogliere: la ricerca di sé e la ricerca di una donna adatta a sé. Ma Niels Lyhne è una personalità complessa, non avremmo potuto capirlo dalle sue azioni. Perché? Perché Niels si ferma sulla soglia dell'azione e, quelle poche volte prova a varcarla, gli va pure abbastanza di merda, povera stella.
Leggere la prima metà è facile come bersi un poroton. Provate a bervi un poroton. Ecco. Però, bevi e bevi, scopri che il poroton è squisito, che ha un sapore paradisiaco che non immaginavi e che assapori sorso dopo sorso. Lo stile di Jacobsen è prolisso, ma eccelso senza dubbio, e la traduttrice inglese gli ha reso giustizia con una certa poeticità del linguaggio dovuta a rime interne e alternanza fra ripetizioni e varietà nel lessico.
Ci sono delle descrizioni che prendono quasi capitoli interi, dei luoghi e dei personaggi e delle sensazioni che questi provano, che sono così ben scritte che ti fanno alzare lo sguardo dal testo per guardare, smarrito/a, nel vuoto della tua pochezza espressiva e ti fanno capire quanto possa essere potente la parola. E per un attimo sublime sei felice di ingoiare poroton.
Leggere la seconda metà è come scivolare lungo un pendio di bellezza verso una conclusione di un'intensità sconvolgente.
Il tema principale, come dicono tutte le sinossi, è l'ateismo di Niels, che da ribellione adolescenziale si trasforma in un vuoto adulto. Ma questo tema principale sfiora la narrazione solo in alcuni punti, mentre per il resto se ne sta sullo sfondo.
Il libro è del 1880, ma è ancora molto romantico per certi versi. Io l'ho letto come se Niels e il suo percorso di crescita fossero un po' un'allegoria della transizione dal romanticismo, coi suoi sentimenti e passioni totalizzanti, verso il realismo e uno sguardo disincantato sulla natura e sull'uomo. Visto così è un Bildungsroman dove il protagonista è il romanzo stesso. Molto romantico anche da parte mia, in effetti
Leggere la prima metà è facile come bersi un poroton. Provate a bervi un poroton. Ecco. Però, bevi e bevi, scopri che il poroton è squisito, che ha un sapore paradisiaco che non immaginavi e che assapori sorso dopo sorso. Lo stile di Jacobsen è prolisso, ma eccelso senza dubbio, e la traduttrice inglese gli ha reso giustizia con una certa poeticità del linguaggio dovuta a rime interne e alternanza fra ripetizioni e varietà nel lessico.
Ci sono delle descrizioni che prendono quasi capitoli interi, dei luoghi e dei personaggi e delle sensazioni che questi provano, che sono così ben scritte che ti fanno alzare lo sguardo dal testo per guardare, smarrito/a, nel vuoto della tua pochezza espressiva e ti fanno capire quanto possa essere potente la parola. E per un attimo sublime sei felice di ingoiare poroton.
Leggere la seconda metà è come scivolare lungo un pendio di bellezza verso una conclusione di un'intensità sconvolgente.
Il tema principale, come dicono tutte le sinossi, è l'ateismo di Niels, che da ribellione adolescenziale si trasforma in un vuoto adulto. Ma questo tema principale sfiora la narrazione solo in alcuni punti, mentre per il resto se ne sta sullo sfondo.
Il libro è del 1880, ma è ancora molto romantico per certi versi. Io l'ho letto come se Niels e il suo percorso di crescita fossero un po' un'allegoria della transizione dal romanticismo, coi suoi sentimenti e passioni totalizzanti, verso il realismo e uno sguardo disincantato sulla natura e sull'uomo. Visto così è un Bildungsroman dove il protagonista è il romanzo stesso. Molto romantico anche da parte mia, in effetti
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April 20, 2009Nobody has written a review for this book?
This book saved my life. A few books have saved my life, but I read this on recommendation from my good friend Ranier Maria Rilke.
There are books that are well-written. And there are books that are smart. And there are books that are witty. And there are books that are none of the above, but move us for reasons we don't quite understand.
This one is the latter. It's not smart. It's not particularly funny, nor does it awe with its style.
Niels Lyhne feels like it's heart is too open to care about such miniscule things like craft (though it makes a worthwhile attempt).
It feels like its only hope, its single ambition, is to be beautiful.
It succeeds.
This book saved my life. A few books have saved my life, but I read this on recommendation from my good friend Ranier Maria Rilke.
There are books that are well-written. And there are books that are smart. And there are books that are witty. And there are books that are none of the above, but move us for reasons we don't quite understand.
This one is the latter. It's not smart. It's not particularly funny, nor does it awe with its style.
Niels Lyhne feels like it's heart is too open to care about such miniscule things like craft (though it makes a worthwhile attempt).
It feels like its only hope, its single ambition, is to be beautiful.
It succeeds.
April 15, 2024
Als reiner Lesegenuss eher zwei Sterne, das Buch war halt ein Wendepunkt in der Literatur und das Kultbuch für zwei Autorengenerationen.
October 15, 2023
Non sapevo cosa aspettarmi da questo libro e devo dire di essermi un po’ addentrata fra le sue pagine al buio..
Nyels è l’eroe che non ti aspetti, quello della solitudine dell’anima e del corpo, del tempo che sfugge senza riuscire a trattenerlo, della volontà di essere qualcosa per qualcuno ma della scoperta al tempo stesso della fugacità dei sentimenti, dell’impossibilità di trattenerli a sé dopo tanto aver penato e della sconfitta.
La scrittura è limpida, non una parola è fuori posto, il ritmo pieno, poetico quasi, come la poesia che Nyels rincorre per tutta la vita e che intesse ogni trama fin dalla nascita, il personaggio perfettamente definito e l’ansia della sua anima chiara.
E’ stata una piacevolissima scoperta.
Nyels è l’eroe che non ti aspetti, quello della solitudine dell’anima e del corpo, del tempo che sfugge senza riuscire a trattenerlo, della volontà di essere qualcosa per qualcuno ma della scoperta al tempo stesso della fugacità dei sentimenti, dell’impossibilità di trattenerli a sé dopo tanto aver penato e della sconfitta.
La scrittura è limpida, non una parola è fuori posto, il ritmo pieno, poetico quasi, come la poesia che Nyels rincorre per tutta la vita e che intesse ogni trama fin dalla nascita, il personaggio perfettamente definito e l’ansia della sua anima chiara.
E’ stata una piacevolissima scoperta.
August 16, 2023
Sometimes you read a book and you find in it certain passages that bring to life or explain something you have felt, believed or thought for a long time and yet never clearly understood or known that others did. When you find that a book takes a special place for you, even though you know it may well not mean the same to anyone else. Such is this book for me.
It is a period piece in style. A little overly melodramatic at points. Flowery writing with some wonderful metaphors that occasionally go on too long. The story is at times overwrought. But still for me this was a special read that I will treasure and read again.
It may be even better in the original Danish, but this is a fine translation with none of the awkwardness that translations sometimes have.
If I had read this years ago I would have wondered why anyone liked it, but it reaches me at a time when its themes resonated. I can’t know whether you will enjoy it either for its themes or its literary merits. But I think this is a great book.
It is a period piece in style. A little overly melodramatic at points. Flowery writing with some wonderful metaphors that occasionally go on too long. The story is at times overwrought. But still for me this was a special read that I will treasure and read again.
It may be even better in the original Danish, but this is a fine translation with none of the awkwardness that translations sometimes have.
If I had read this years ago I would have wondered why anyone liked it, but it reaches me at a time when its themes resonated. I can’t know whether you will enjoy it either for its themes or its literary merits. But I think this is a great book.
September 9, 2017
As most readers today I approached this book by Rilke’s recommendation. Reading this life story was not an unalloyed pleasure, however. The book is too episodic to be considered a novel. It comes across as a sequence of Jugendstil-ish woodcuts in which the relationships between the protagonist and (usually) a woman are quasi-allegorically played out. But Jacobson’s heavily perfumed prose occasionally makes way for acute, sobering psychological insights that have lost nothing of their pertinence. That is what makes a reading of this book still worthwhile. Here is a key passage that mirrors the concerns and self-doubts that many of us may have when contemplating the jarring dissonance between a felt assessment of our talents and the worth of our realizations:
“For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it …”
Finally, kudos to Tiina Nunnally for what strikes me as an excellent translation. This must have been a real labor of love.
“For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it …”
Finally, kudos to Tiina Nunnally for what strikes me as an excellent translation. This must have been a real labor of love.
March 26, 2016
Niels Lyhne is a book haunted by death.
The story follows a young poet, Niels Lyhne who passionately observes the world and the people in his life before he delves into himself, reflecting and dwelling on their motives and nature in order to transfer his thoughts into his writing. His convictions about the world are tested a number of times throughout the novel as he deals with rejection, loss, betrayal and numerous deaths...and it all culminates in the final chapters when his resolve almost fails and his character breaks.
Niels is deeply emotional. We often see him paralysed and helpless, sick with the feelings and emotions that reach deep within his soul weighing heavily on his mind and forcing him to take indefinite breaks from him work. But he is also rational to an extreme: he is an atheist in a time when it was near impossible to be one and he argues his stand on the subject beautifully and logically.
The words are so powerful, the description so alive that this book doesnt feel like a story but it is the living soul of Niels Lyhne, dripping with passion and emotion and struggling to make sense of the world. Shameful confessions and painful admission honestly and bluntly laid bare. I wish I read this novel years ago.
The story follows a young poet, Niels Lyhne who passionately observes the world and the people in his life before he delves into himself, reflecting and dwelling on their motives and nature in order to transfer his thoughts into his writing. His convictions about the world are tested a number of times throughout the novel as he deals with rejection, loss, betrayal and numerous deaths...and it all culminates in the final chapters when his resolve almost fails and his character breaks.
Niels is deeply emotional. We often see him paralysed and helpless, sick with the feelings and emotions that reach deep within his soul weighing heavily on his mind and forcing him to take indefinite breaks from him work. But he is also rational to an extreme: he is an atheist in a time when it was near impossible to be one and he argues his stand on the subject beautifully and logically.
The words are so powerful, the description so alive that this book doesnt feel like a story but it is the living soul of Niels Lyhne, dripping with passion and emotion and struggling to make sense of the world. Shameful confessions and painful admission honestly and bluntly laid bare. I wish I read this novel years ago.
Want to read
September 5, 2011Had never heard of JPJ until I came across reference to this novel in recent essay by James Wood, "The New Atheism," in The Guardian. Wood argues that whereas the "new atheists" like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al and fundamentalist Christians are equally guilty of engaging in narrow, literalist approaches to questions of faith, novelists like JPJ provide far more insightful reflections on such questions by exploring the ambiguities of a fluctuating faith that most of us experience. Essentially, Wood makes the case for power of literature to transcend ideological positions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...
September 20, 2018
Pretty similar than Marie Grubbe. Not bad but not the most memorable book either.
January 29, 2018
The "Madame Bovary" of North.
Read
July 21, 2010Jens Peter Jacobsen writes:
They began to talk about Christianity. It was as if the subject was in the air.
Niels spoke fervently but rather superficially against Christianity.
Hjerrild was tired of retracing the threads of conversations that were old for him, and he said suddenly, without any real connection to the preceding: "Be careful, Mr. Lyhne; Christianity has power. It's stupid to quarrel with the ruling truth by agitating for the truth of the crown prince."
"Stupid or not, that's not a consideration."
"Don't say that so lightly. It was not my intention to tell you the obvious thing, that in material respects it is stupid; it is stupid in terms of ideas, it is stupid and even more than that. Be careful; if it isn't unavoidably necessary for your temperament, then don't bind yourself too strongly to that right now. As a poet you have so many other interests."
"I probably don't understand you, but I can't treat myself like an organ grinder who takes out a less popular tune and puts a different one in, one that everybody is going around whistling."
"You can't? There are those who can. But you could say: we don't play that tune. Usually you can do a lot more in that way than you think. People aren't that consistent. When you keep on energetically using your right arm, an excess of blood rushes to it, and it increases in size at the cost of the other limbs, while the legs that you use only when necessary grow rather thin, all by themselves. Do you get the picture? Look at the way most, and also probably the best, intellectual forces here in Denmark have turned exclusively toward political freedom. Look at that and let it be a lesson to you. Believe me, there is a redeeming joy for a person in fighting for an idea that is popular, while it is so demoralizing to belong to the losing minority which life, in the course that it takes, proves wrong, point by point and step by step. It could not be any different, for it is so bitterly discouraging to see that what you are convinced, from the innermost silence of your soul, is true and right, to see this truth ridiculed and struck in the face by even the lowliest believer in the victorious army, to hear it slandered with obscene names, and then not be able to do anything, nothing but love it even more faithfully, kneel before it in your heart with even deeper reverence. And to see its beautiful countenance just as radiantly beautiful, just as full of the sublime and the immortal light, no matter how much dust is whirled at its white forehead, or how close a poisonous fog thickens around its halo. It is bitterly discouraging, it cannot be avoided - your soul will be hurt by this, for it's so easy to hate so that your heart grows so weary, to call up the cold shadows of contempt around you, and, apathetic with pain, let the world pass by. Of course, if you have it in you, if instead of choosing the easier way, instead of taking yourself out of all connection with the whole, you can stand erect and with all your talents alert, all your sympathies awake, you can receive the many-thorned lashes as they fall, lash after lash, and still keep your bloody head from drooping, as you listen for the dull sounds prophesying change in your time, and search for the faint, distant gleam which is a day - a time - perhaps; if you have that in you! But do not try it, Lyhne. Think what such a man's life would be like, if he is to do his utmost. Unable to speak without boos and hisses foaming up in the footsteps of his speech. To have all his words distorted, besmirched, twisted out of joint, twined into cunning snares, thrown at his feet, and then before he had even gathered them up out of the dirt, and untangled them from one another, suddenly to discover that the whole world is deaf. And then to start all over again from another point, with the same results, over and over. And then perhaps the most painful of all, to see himself misunderstood and scorned by noble men and women, whom he, in spite of his different beliefs, regards with admiration and respect. And that's the way it has to be, it cannot be any different. The opposition cannot expect to be attached for what it actually is and wants, but for what those in power want to believe it is and intends. And besides, power used upon the weak and misuse of power: how can they be two different things? And certainly no one will demand that those in power ought to make themselves weak in order to fight with equal weapons against the opposition. But that is why the struggle of the opposition is so painful, so agonizing. And do you really think, Lyhne, that a man can fight that battle, with all those vulture beaks sunk into him, without the invincible, blind enthusiasm that is fanaticism? And how in the world can he be fanatical about something negative? Fanatical about idea that there is no God! - and without fanaticism, no victory. Hush, listen!"
They stopped outside a high--ceilinged apartment on the ground floor where the blinds were pulled up on one of the windows, and through the open ventilation window a song reached them, borne by the clear voices of women and children:
A child is born in Bethlehem,
Bethlehem!
For Jerusalem rejoices.
Hallelujah, hallelujah!
They walked on in silence. The melody, or rather the notes from the piano, followed them down the quiet street.
"Did you hear," said Hjerrild, "did you hear the excitement in that old Hebraic cry of victory? And those two Jewish city names! Jerusalem, it was not merely symbolic: the whole city - Copenhagen, Denmark. It was us, the Christian people among the people."
"There is no God, and the human being is His prophet!" said Niels bitterly, but also with despair.
"Yes, that's right!" ridiculed Hjerrild. A little later he added: "But atheism is so boundlessly pedestrian, and its goal, in the long run, is nothing less that a disillusioned humanity. Belief in a ruling, judgmental God, that is the last great illusion of humanity, and what then, when that is gone? Then people will be wiser; but richer, happier? I can't see it."
"But don't you see," exclaimed Niels, "that the day humanity can freely cry: there is no God, on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Only then will heaven become the free, infinite place instead of a threatening, watchful eye. Only then will the earth belong to us and we to the earth, when the dim world of salvation and condemnation out there has burst like a bubble. The earth will be our proper fatherland, the home of our heart where we do not dwell as foreign guests for a paltry time but for all our days. And what intensity it will give life when everything must be contained in life and nothing is placed outside of it. That enormous stream of love, which now rises up toward that God who is believed in, will bend back over the earth when heaven is empty, with loving steps toward all the beautiful, human traits and talents with which we have empowered and adorned God in order to make God worthy of our love. Goodness, justice, wisdom, who can name them all? Don't you realize what nobility would spread over humanity if people could live their lives freely and meet their deaths without fear of hell or hope of heaven, but fearing themselves and with hope for themselves? How our conscience would grow, and what stability it would bring if passive remorse and humility could no longer atone for anything, and no forgiveness was possible except to use goodness to redeem the evil you committed with evil."
"You must have amazing faith in humanity: atheism will make greater demands on people than Christianity does."
"Of course."
"Of course; but where will you find all those strong individuals you will need to put together your atheistic humanity?"
"Little by little, atheism itself will teach them; not this generation or the next one or the next one after that - they will not be able to bear atheism, I realize that, but in every generation there will always be a few who will honestly fight for a life in it and a death in it, and over the course of time they will acquire a number of spiritual ancestors whom their descendants can look back on with pride and gain strength by observing them. In the beginning the conditions will make things the most difficult, most will fall in the struggle, and those who are victorious will win only with tattered banners, for their innermost marrow will still be steeped in tradition, and because there is so much else in a human being than just the brain that must be convinced: blood and nerves, hopes and longings, yes, and if thee are dreams they must be convinced too. But it doesn't matter, someday it will come, and the few will be the many."
"Do you think so? I'm searching for a name; couldn't you call it 'pietistic atheism'?"
"All true atheism..." began Niels, but Hjerrild quickly interupted him.
"Of course!" he said. "Of course; by all means let us have only a single gate, one single eye of a needle for all the camels in the kingdom of the earth!"
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