The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan

It is true that there would be times when his wild surges of blood subsided for a moment, when he, as it were, came to observe his own face--and looked away. He would then become almost afraid of himself... the sight of his own hand, still bloody from helping with the flaying of seals. Or his uncut, unkempt beard. The suddenly alien sound of his deep voice. Unbidden, visions of his grandfather's terrifying aura would visit him. And the mute silence the name of this "ogre" invoked. The petrified stare in his mother's anxious eyes on the only occasion she had allowed his grandfather's name to pass her lips.

The titular bear of Danish Nobel winner Henrik Pontoppidan's The White Bear is Thorkild Muller, a priest who has spent the bulk of his life preaching to indigenous Greenlanders. As a young man in Denmark, Thorkild is a wayward rascal who offers his services to the Danish in Greenland, thinking he'll basically fuck up his schooling so bad they'll never actually put him in a parish, but as it turns out, he's underestimated the inevitability of bureaucracy. He's a poor and talentless priest, but there comes a moment when he decides to toss away the proprieties of Danish civilization to live among, and like, the Greenlanders, even taking a wife among them. When he returns, as an old man, to Denmark, he has gained fervor and intellect, and even becomes popular among regular parishioners. But he's too wild for the Danish church, who essentially chase him back to Greenland. It's a slim, almost parable-like story, that pokes fun at a buttoned-up Danish culture and suggests that what the Danes perceive as Indigenous "wildness" may represent a truer and more genuine religion.

I'm a sucker for stories about the Arctic, and about Indigenous peoples, but I actually preferred the other novella in this small duo. Titled "The Rearguard," it focuses on a recently married Danish couple living in Rome, Jorgen and Ursula. Jorgen is a notorious painter working in the school of social realism, and Ursula is drawn to him because she admires both his talent and his passion, though she herself is the daughter of an bureaucrat who represents nearly everything that Jorgen despises. Like the young Thorkild of "The White Bear," Jorgen's red hair represents his fiery idiosyncrasy, and the reader has some sympathy with Jorgen's enthusiasm for tearing down the pieties of civil society in favor of a socialist utopia. But, like many would-be revolutionaries, Jorgen turns out to be a total boor. He can't go anywhere without making a scene; he chews out his fellow painters for their violations of his own orthodoxies. Ursula, too, often bears the brunt of his overflow of passion and vitriol; also like many would-be revolutionaries, he makes few distinctions among his targets, and the young marriage founders as it's just beginning. I found this the stronger of the two novellas because Jorgen is a really well-done character--Pontoppidan captures his proud, irascible voice in a way that made it more memorable.

OK, so I'm going to start keeping track of the Nobel Prize winners I've read. With the addition of Pontoppidan, I've read 59/122, so not quite half. I probably won't read them all, but maybe it'll be a nice way of discovering some new things.