Mogens and Other Stories

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Flynn, T. (2007). The new encyclopedia of unbelief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. "Danish atheists include the authors...Jens Peter Jacobsen." Quoted in Jensen, A Difficult Death, xxii-xxiii in the translation by M. D. Herter of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 24-25. Beautifully written, smart, compassionate – and scary as hell. Matt Wesolowski is one of the most exciting and original voices in crime fiction’ Alex North Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity, which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people there are who by natural constitution have been given a different nature and disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning which is wilder and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are open wider; their senses are more subtle in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands." - Jens Peter Jacobsen. The quote is not from this book. I stole it from the introduction. The stories are way, way better than this because it's like there is this secret hand shake for us sensitive types. We should have one so we can recognize each other. Maybe the sweaty palms would be a dead giveaway? Or the leaves in the hair and grass stains on the trousers from sitting outside too long. It could be the dark circles under the eyes from sleeping for way too long, and not enough. You'll know them from the look in the eye. Whatever, there's unrest. A relentless and original work of modern rural noir which beguiles and unnerves in equal measure. Matt Wesolowski is a major talent’ Eva Dolan

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Gay Science: Book V, Section 343," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 447-48. A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen by Morten Høi Jensen, 2017, Yale University Press (978-0300218930)In a letter he once stated his belief that every book to be of real value must embody the struggle of one or more persons against all those things which try to keep one from existing in one’s own way. That is the fundamental ethos which runs through all of Jacobsen’s work. It is in Marie Grubbe, Niels Lyhne, Mogens, and the infinitely tender Mrs. Fonss.

I had this short book on my TBR pile for years and finally read it a few years ago after that blurb caught my eye. A few weeks ago I happened to be reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and I saw that his detailed comments about Jacobsen were even more enthusiastic:Do avail yourself of the small book Six Stories by J. P. Jacobsen [the one I am reviewing] and his novel Niels Lyhne, and begin with the first story in the first set, called “Mogens.” A whole world will envelop you…Live awhile within these books. Learn of them…but above all, love them. For this love you will be requited a thousand and a thousand times over…If I were obliged to tell you who taught me to experience something of the essence of creativity, the depth of it and its enduring quality, there are only two names that I can name: that of Jacobsen, the very greatest of writers, and Auguste Rodin, the sculptor. No one among all artists living today compares with them. Overshadowed by the later generations that were influenced by him, Jacobsen's works have fallen out of our literary consciousness. To counter this, I am launching my AU Series on "Weaving Jens Peter Jacobsen into the Fabric of Literary Consciousness" with this essay.