Alas, the past cannot be escaped so easily. Fable and allegory curl themselves like creepers around our hero’s feet. Per has, in effect, been exiled from Eden, for the Adamic sin of stealing apples. But his home wasn’t Edenic, and besides, he doesn’t share his father’s Christian faith. If he hasn’t committed a sin, how can he be cursed? All the secular energy of this novel—and it has a magnificent, liberating secular power—pushes against the reality of the pastor’s Old Testament damnation. Yet Per is cursed: he’s destined to wander, destined to quest, and destined to fail. With a steady, returning beat, closer to allegorical verse than to realist fiction, the novel reminds us of its guiding theme: the homelessness of its hero, condemned to spend his life in the lonely quest for a metaphysical safe harbor. So is Per’s curse a religious curse or a fairy-tale curse? And what is the difference between the two?

Per’s odd life path might simply be the result of being born into the Sidenius family. The Sideniuses, we learn at the novel’s opening, trace their lineage, through generations of ministers, all the way back to the Reformation. It’s a family tree of unimpeachable piety and dreary episcopal conformity, with one exception. An ancestor, also a pastor, known as Mad Sidenius, somehow went off the rails. He drank brandy with the peasants, and assaulted the parish clerk. In a novel haunted by insanity and suicide, the memory of this family outcast is important. The potentially blasphemous question rears its head again: if it’s a curse to be a Sidenius, is Per cursed by generations of unerring piety, or by that ancestral aberrant flash of madness?

Henrik Pontoppidan’s life began much like his fictional hero’s. He was born in 1857, the son of a Jutland pastor, into a family that had produced countless clergymen. Unlike Per, Pontoppidan seems to have remained on friendly terms with his family, despite drifting away from his inherited Christianity. In his memoir, published in 1940, three years before his death, he declared himself to be an out-and-out rationalist, dismayed by the tenacity of religious superstition. Like Per, he left the provinces to study engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen of the eighteen-seventies and eighties has been described (by the critic Morten Høi Jensen) as “the first real battleground of European Modernism.” A parochially Protestant culture was beginning to do intellectual trade with the rest of Europe: French realism and naturalism, Darwinism and radical atheism were the imported goods. The two most talented conduits of these new freedoms were the novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen and the critic Georg Brandes, both of whom make appearances in fictionalized form in “Lucky Per.” Jacobsen translated Darwin’s major work into Danish, and wrote what is surely one of the most fanatically and superbly atheistic novels in existence, “Niels Lyhne” (1880). A lyrical aesthete and a Flaubertian prose polisher, he is pictured, in “Lucky Per,” as the sickly poet Enevoldsen, fussing with his lorgnette at a Copenhagen café while worrying about “where to put a comma.” Jacobsen was championed by Brandes, whose lectures at the University of Copenhagen in 1871 were an inspiration for a generation of Scandinavian writers. (Brandes and Pontoppidan corresponded for decades.) Brandes had read Mill, Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss. A fervent atheist, he introduced Danish readers to Nietzsche and, late in life, wrote a book entitled “Jesus: A Myth” (1925). He was an advocate of European naturalism, and of fiction that attended to the social and political moment. It was time, he argued, to open Denmark up to the outside—a movement that became known as the Modern Breakthrough. In “Lucky Per,” Brandes appears throughout the novel, more invoked than encountered, as the dominating Dr. Nathan, sometimes nicknamed Dr. Satan. Brandes was Jewish, and Pontoppidan, remarkably alert to European anti-Semitism throughout the novel, writes that Per had kept his distance from Dr. Nathan because of this: “He simply didn’t like that foreign race, nor did he have any leaning toward literary men.”

But Per’s life will soon be changed by another Jewish character, and one who shares the bulk of the novel with him: the fierce, brilliant, troubled Jakobe Salomon. Per meets Jakobe through her brother, Ivan, who decides, early in the novel, that Per has the potential of a Caesar on whose brow God has written “I come, I see, I conquer!” Per’s imperial impulses are manifest in his vast utopian engineering project, which envisages “a system of canals on the Dutch model” that will connect Denmark’s rivers, lakes, and fjords with one another, “and put the cultivated heaths and the flourishing new towns into contact with the sea on both sides.” His dream is a physical enactment of Brandes’s Modern Breakthrough. He also shares Brandes’s atheism. “There was no hell,” Per reflects, “other than what mankind, afraid of love’s joy and the body’s force, created in its monstrous imagination.” The Anglophone reader is sometimes reminded of Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence. Per exults in the healthy secularism of the body: “The embrace of man and woman was the heaven in which there is oblivion for all sorrows, forgiveness for all sins, where souls meet in guiltless nakedness like Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise.”

With the ruthlessness of the provincial hero, Per decides that marriage to an heiress of the vast Salomon merchant fortune will speed him on his way. At first, though, he stirs in Jakobe a deep-seated hatred of Christian culture, and she treats him with an insulting haughtiness. Bookish, sensitive, twenty-three, and already considered a bit of an old maid by her family, Jakobe had been a sickly child, and the target of anti-Semitic bullying. Per triggers in her a memory, at once sharp and hallucinatory, narrated with dreamlike indulgence by Pontoppidan, and one of the novel’s most potent scenes. Four years earlier, Jakobe had been in a Berlin railway station. Her eye was caught by a group of “pitiable, ragged people surrounded by a circle of curious, gaping onlookers.” When she asked a station official how to get to the waiting room, he replied that with her nose she should find it easy to smell her way there. On the floor of the waiting room were hundreds more desperate, emaciated paupers. Suddenly, she realized that they were Russian Jews, on their way to America via Germany. She had heard of the pogroms, and was astounded that this “infamy crying out to heaven could happen right before Europe’s eyes with no authoritative voice raised against it!” Per’s Nordic frame and blue eyes make her think of two police officers she glimpsed in Berlin, who seemed the embodiments of the “brutal self-righteousness” of the Christian society she lives in.

With great ironic power, Pontoppidan convinces us that Jakobe and Per must inevitably hate each other, and then, soon enough, that these two damaged creatures could have found comfort only in each other. Their relationship is passionately erotic and ardently intellectual; Jakobe, again like some heroine out of D. H. Lawrence, is helplessly attracted to Per, despite the blaring correctives from her conscience. The couple have in common their committed atheism, their hatred of the established church, and a sense of being “chosen”—by theology, by race, by similarly heroic notions of destiny.

Garth Risk Hallberg, in his introduction, says that Jakobe Salomon is “as intelligent as anyone out of James, as bold as anyone out of Austen, as perverse as anyone out of Dostoyevsky,” and adds that, “with all due respect,” the frankness and amplitude of Pontoppidan’s depiction of the Salomon household leaves George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda “in the dust.” I like it when writers are made to run races with one another, precisely because we’re supposed to be above such competitions, and I also think that Hallberg is right. Jakobe is utterly alive and complex, and burns at the living center of the book. Pontoppidan endows her with an extraordinary intellectual restlessness, and allows her some of the most movingly lucid secular proclamations I have ever encountered in fiction.