Henrik Pontoppidan was one of the greatest writers and social critics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Denmark, yet his works were only introduced to English readers over one hundred years later. Rife with cultural insight, no-holds-barred excoriations, and a firm conviction in the potential of the individual, The White Bear—a newly published collection of his two novellas—provides a valuable entrance into a writer deeply suspicious of the hypocrisies and repressions of modern life, one whom Georg Lukács praised as rendering ‘possible a journey through a really vital and dynamic life-totality by its semblance of movement’.

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The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated from the Danish by Paul Larkin, New York Review Books, 2025

In discussing why we continue to revisit canonical tragedies despite always knowing how they will end, the classicist Bryan Doerries speaks to the worth of spectating on the human capacity for trying. Our myths are full of overwhelmingly fatalistic forces: of destiny, of divine fury, of mysterious arrivals, of certain pains. Yet they are ever-resonant to us not because of any sadistic pleasure to be derived from their characters’ sufferings, but because they have the potential to ‘wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late’. For those in the stories, they walk certainly into their terrible ends—yet for us in the audience, we are given knowledge of the brief moments where things could have been different, where a single turn, or conversation, or even just a few extra minutes of time, could save us and the people we love. Perhaps in taking that understanding back home from the theatre into our own lives, we will have sufficient courage to live not in apathy but in boldness, knowing that there is only one thing that can possibly stand up against chance, and that is choice.

The two novellas that make up Henrik Pontoppidan’s The White Bear are not dissimilar to Greek tragedies, in that they too are concerned with how we can diverge or distinguish ourselves from the long, seemingly straight line of our lives. The titular narrative concerns a pastor in the late nineteenth century who is sent from Denmark into the colony of Greenland. Named Thorkild, this godly man’s position in society is determined at birth; Pontoppidan goes into great description of his appearance and stature, painting the image of a beastly, gargantuan figure whose every feature is an extreme caricature: the face ‘flame-red’ and beard ‘snow-white’, a deafening laugh that incites the howls of dogs, a habit of leaving food remnants across his visage and clothing, a huge body that leaves the furniture in protest—‘born into this world as a freak’. He’s called to Greenland by a kind of divine intervention, based on the perceived unnaturalness of his being, and is sent into exile despite failing by any accounts to pass the necessary examinations. His country rid itself of him with haste, and so in a motion that any expatriate or migrant would recognise, he leaves his native land with little ceremony or resolve, pulled into a crossing that is beyond his control, but that is nevertheless for him to make. READ MORE…