Niels Lyhne is, to the extent the book is known at all, most known for having been the inspiration for R M Rilke’s book the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke is even said to have carried around with him the collected works of Jacobsen, wherever he went. J P Jacobsen had a lot of admirers a century ago. Others who professed their admiration were Hesse, Mann and Schnitzler. Andric, Snoilsky and Obstfelder. But the sands of time change who is remembered and why. In an effort to rescue Jacobsen from total oblivion, I decided to review his second novel Niels Lyhne.
It is a bildungsroman of sorts, though spanning a whole life. It is about the tides of fate and twists and turns in a person’s life, and how to deal with them. The protagonist, Niels Lyhne, is born in rural Denmark and in the early 1800s. His mother is a dreamer and his father is a level-headed farmer. He feels he is a bit of both, but he is a sensitive soul and early turns to poetry. His best friend becomes a painter. He develops romantic feelings for his elder cousin. His whole life seems to be a string of unrealised emotional longings. His life is also lined with the recurring loss of loved ones, and the subsequent anguish about how to deal with it. A theme throughout the book is the topic of God and belief. Existential themes, one might say. The original working title of the book was ”the atheist”, but Jacobsen went with a more neutral (and in that sense, better) title in the end. Jacobsen had been profoundly touched by reading Darwin and was the first who translated him into Danish. It informed a lot of his thoughts in this book.
He was a very sensitive writer with lots of beautiful descriptions of nature and human affairs. It reminds me of Joyce‘s Portrait of the Artist, and of Turgenev in a way. Apparently Turgenev was also an influence on Jacobsen. Other sources of inspiration was H.E. Schack‘s Phantasterne and Holberg‘s Niels Klim.
The atheism reminds me of the 1950s existentialism, and he was probably influenced by his countryman Søren Kierkegaard (which by the way means Soren Graveyard (or churchyard)). In an interview with a young Danish émigré to the US, Morten Høi Jensen, we learn of the many similarities between Jacobsen and Camus (although they are separated by 2/3 of a century). Morten Høi Jensen is the author of an intellectual biography of Jacobsen which came out 2017. His outlook reminds me of Yale complit professor Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.
The atheism reminds me of the 1950s existentialism, and he was probably influenced by his countryman Søren Kierkegaard (which by the way means Soren Graveyard (or churchyard)). In an interview with a young Danish émigré to the US, Morten Høi Jensen, we learn of the many similarities between Jacobsen and Camus (although they are separated by 2/3 of a century). Morten Høi Jensen is the author of an intellectual biography of Jacobsen which came out 2017. His outlook reminds me of Yale complit professor Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.
I read this book in the original Danish, which was quite the experience. I picked up lots of old words and found new appreciation for the Scandinavian languages in general. Jacobsen has several nice expressions and images that I appreciated. Lots of poetic images in the prose. It was fascinating to inhabit the thought-world of a 1870s writer with all the complex issues floating about at that time. I feel the need to deepen my knowledge of 19th century thought by reading more novels from that time. The plupart of the ones I’ve read so far have been Russian, and they are their own category, really.
Last note: Jacobsen is part of the Danish national literary canon, with his first book Fru Maria Grubbe. Niels Lyhne is his second book and then he only managed to write short stories before his untimely demise in tuberculosis at the age of 38 in 1885. He was kind of a proto-Proust figure in that he wrote in bed until he died. Who else is known for that?
Kinship of all Species 