The White Bear

Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.

The White Bear and The Rearguard are two of Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan’s most acclaimed novellas: tales of personal, political, and religious strife, full of keen psychological insight, set amid the sweeping changes of late nineteenth-century Danish society. Pontoppidan’s prose is spellbinding in its taut, unvarnished grace, a quality translator Paul Larkin masterfully captures in this stunning new translation.

The White Bear is the odyssey of the priest Thorkild Müller, who becomes minister to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland and is slowly integrated within the community. After spending much of his adult life in Greenland, he returns to Denmark, where his popularity among his parishioners brings the ire of the Church upon his head.

Newlyweds Jørgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jørgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism. Ursula, on the other hand, comes from an upper-middle-class family and is politically conservative. Though each strives to change the other’s worldview as they start their new life in Rome, tensions rise, and misunderstandings abound. A searching examination of art and individuality, this version of The Rearguard is the never-before-translated 1905 edition, which elucidates with greater complexity Jorgen’s character as well as Ursula’s resolve to temper him with love.