Like many others, I read it because it is recommended by Rainer Maria Rilke in his book - Letters to a Young Poet. My kindle version had 4 stories and not 6 and I liked 'Mogens' the most and then 'Mrs Fonss'. Let me tell you that I did not like the book for the stories but I loved it for the way it has been written. Jacobsen's writing style is highly poetic and he creates a scene with such a great beauty and with so minute details that you can visualize the whole scene exactly and would feel as if you are actually living it. Jacobson was a botanist as well as a poet. "She was a botanist so I believed her." - Lee in Sam Shepard's True West. And a poet, it goes without saying.

Jacobsen lived, like Franz Schubert, a relatively short life due to his contraction of tuberculosis which left him weak and mainly homebound for the last decade of his life. But, whereas Schubert completed over 1,500 works in his 31 years, Jacobsen only completed a collection of short stories, two novels, and a collection of poems in his 38 years (he admits to having been plagued by laziness!). Jacobsen is unique in that he had such a strong influence with such a small output. Jacobsen also influenced many other authors of the turn of the 20th century, including Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, and T. E. Lawrence, who all commented on his work. Thomas Mann once told an interviewer that "perhaps it is J. P. Jacobsen who has had the greatest influence on my style so far." [3] Mogens says that her vision is beautiful but prods whether she really sees that, to which Thora asks, "But [don't] you?" and he gives an answer that captures both that wonderful imagery of nature and the conflict of Man in confrontation with that reality:The historical novel Fru Marie Grubbe (1876, Eng. transl.: Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Century 1917) is the first Danish treatment of a woman as a sexual creature. Based upon the life of a 17th-century Danish noblewoman, it charts her downfall from a member of the royal family to the wife of a ferryman, as a result of her desire for an independent and satisfying erotic life. In many ways the book anticipates the themes of D. H. Lawrence. One character, an uneducated man, talks of his upper class girlfriend’s acquaintances: “There’s not a thing between heaven and earth that they can’t finish off with a wave of the hand: this is base and that is noble; this is the stupidest thing since the creation of the world, and that is the cleverest; one thing is so ugly…They all know the same things and talk the same way, they all have the same words and the same opinions.” a b Jensen, Morten Høi (2017). A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp.xviii. ISBN 978-0300218930. She did not feel herself younger, but it seemed to her as if a fountain of tears that had been obstructed and dammed had burst open again and begun to flow. There was great happiness and relief in crying, and these tears gave her a feeling of richness; it was as if she had become more precious, and everything had become more precious to her—in short it was a feeling of youth after all. He meets Thora and gradually is able to come to terms with Camilla's terrible death, allowing himself to fall in love again. Life does not become easy for Mogens as he continually has to confront the fear of losing another one of his loves—love which he had stopped believing in but is now finding a redeeming thread of meaning within it again. He is slow to open himself ("one never can wholly escape from one's self" states the narrator) but eventually is able to overcome his fears:

Aristocratic? No, that is lather paradoxical. If he is not a democrat, then I really don’t know what he is.” He closed his eyes; how vividly he saw [Thora]; he heard her voice, she bent down toward him and whispered—how he loved her, loved her, loved her! It was like a song within him; it seemed as if his thoughts took on rhythmic form, and how clearly he could see everything of which he thought! There is in his work something of the passion for form and style that one finds in Flaubert and Pater, but where they are often hard, percussive, like a piano, he is soft and strong and intimate like a violin on which he plays his reading of life. Such analogies, however, have little significance, except that they indicate a unique and powerful artistic personality. Elusive online journalist Scott King investigates the murder of a teenager at an outward bound centre, in the first episode of the critically acclaimed, international bestselling Six Stories series… Readers of Kathleen Barber’s Are You Sleeping and fans of Ruth Ware will enjoy this slim but compelling novel’ BooklistFriedrich Nietzsche, "Second Essay, Section 24," On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of NIetzsche, trans. and ed. with commentaries by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 532. There was a swishing of wind in the gable-windows, in the poplars of the manor-house; the wind whistled through tattered bushes on the green hill of Bredbjerg. Mogens lay up there, and gazed out over the dark earth. The moon was beginning to acquire radiance, and mists were drifting down on the meadow. Everything was very sad, all of life, all of life, empty behind him, dark before him. But such was life. Those who were happy were also blind. Through misfortune he had learned to see; everything was full of injustice and lies, the entire earth was a huge, rotting lie; faith, friendship, mercy, a lie it was, a lie was each and everything; but that which was called love, it was the hollowest of all hollow things, it was lust, flaming lust, glimmering lust, smoldering lust, but lust and nothing else. Why had he to know this? Why had he not been permitted to hold fast to his faith in all these gilded lies? Why was he compelled to see while the others remained blind? He had a right to blindness, he had believed in everything in which it was possible to believe. Firstly, everyone should be going to the Gutenberg Project to get loads of free e-books in a variety of formats. And if they’re not in a format you need it isn’t too hard to convert – thems the joys of the internet. Secondly, Mogens and Other Stories is a collection of novellas and short stories, that while not a normal thing for me to read was an excellent change. And yes I went through the entire book in a day but sometimes that happens. And my childhood’s belief in everything beautiful in the world.—And what if they were right, the others! If the world were full of beating hearts and the heavens full of a loving God! But why do I not know that, why do I know something different? And I do know something different, cutting, bitter, true..

The best passages from this story describe nature scenes and it was evident Jens Peter Jacobsen was a botanist. Lccn 72004452 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL8205480M Openlibrary_edition In case we bask in the glow of progress and the delight of feeling ourselves superior to our predecessors, it's worth remembering that the response to Edward Bond's Saved in 1965 and Sarah Kane's Blasted 30 years later was remarkably similar. In the story, A Shot in the Fog, a spurned man secretly kills his lover’s intended husband and eventually gets even more revenge; “Why should life be so bright and easy for her, when she had plundered every trace of light from him?”The audience for a play has to be left with the impression that the characters exist independently of the writer and have come to life spontaneously. "Sitting in judgment on oneself" means mediating one's ideas, emotions and anxieties through one's characters, who in their turn have to absorb the subject matter into their bloodstream – in the case of Ghosts: patriarchy, class, free love, prostitution, hypocrisy, heredity, incest and euthanasia. In that sense Helene Alving, the protagonist of Ghosts, is as much an autobiographical portrait as Hedda: yearning for emotional and sexual freedom but too timid to achieve it, a rebel who fears rebellion, a scourge who longs for approbation and love. There was a love, pure and noble, without any coarse, earthly passion; yes, there was, and if there was not, there was going to be one. Passion spoiled everything, and it was very ugly and unhuman. How he hated everything in human nature that was not tender and pure, fine and gentle! He had been subjugated, weighed down, tormented, by this ugly and powerful force; it had lain in his eyes and ears, it had poisoned all his thoughts. In spite of his not very extensive oeuvre Jacobsen's international influence has been quite strong. In Germany both his novels and poems were widely read and they are known to have influenced Thomas Mann, as well as the Englishmen George Gissing and D. H. Lawrence. Gissing read the Reclam edition of Niels Lyhne in 1889 and again in 1890 when he wrote 'which I admire more than ever'. [5] Jacobsen's works also greatly inspired Rainer Maria Rilke's prose: in Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (trans. Letters to a Young Poet) (1929) Rilke recommends to Franz Xaver Kappus to read the works of Jacobsen, adding that Rilke always carried the Bible and Jacobsen's collected works. Further, Rilke's only novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (translated as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) (1910) is semi-autobiographical but is heavily influenced by Jacobsen's second novel Niels Lyhne (1880) which traces the fate of an atheist in a merciless world.

Standing, looking at Thora sleeping, "the last shadow of his past" disappears. The story ends with the two happy lovers disappearing into a field of grain, laughing with each other. Jacobsen vividly inserts us into this final scene through his powerful sense of natural imagery: Mogens og andre Noveller and Niels Lyhne were both highly praised by Rainer Maria Rilke in his letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, translated as Letters to a Young Poet. [4] Poetry [ edit ] Jacobsen was an open atheist at a time in which that was a radical sentiment. His works are a testament to the struggle one goes through when trying to live in a world whose moral systems differ from one's own and the difficulty in finding a new place to center one's sense of meaning.But what joy can you take in a tree or a bush, if you don't imagine that a living being dwells within it, that opens and closes the flowers and smooths the leaves? When you see a lake, a deep, clear lake, don't you love it for this reason, that you imagine creatures living deep, deep down below, that have their own joys and sorrows, that have their own strange life with strange yearnings? And what, for instance, is there beautiful about the green hill of Berdbjerg, if you don't imagine, that inside very tiny creatures swarm and buzz, and sigh when the sun rises, but begin to dance and play with their beautiful treasure-troves, as soon as evening comes." Disturbing, compelling and atmospheric, it will terrify and enthral you in equal measure’ M W Craven Which is, of course, what lies in the process of directing a play and translating it: it's a matter of making choices. The first choice – and the first indication of the difficulty of rendering any play into another language – is what title to give the play. When Ghosts was first translated into English by William Archer, Ibsen disliked the title. The Norwegian title, Gjengangere, means "a thing that walks again", rather than the appearance of a soul of a dead person. But "Againwalkers" is an ungainly title and the alternative "Revenants" is both awkward and French. Ghosts has a poetic resonance to the English ear. Morten Høi Jensen, in his masterful biography of Jacobsen—the only full English-language study of Jacobsen to date—goes a step further than Gustafson saying that it would be "misguided" to state Jacobsen's objection of the subjective over the objective view of nature too rigidly.[5] In reality, Jacobsen's work portrays an inner conflict between the rational realism gained by an objective view of the world and the story-driven subjective beliefs that society carries. He shows that, despite scientific advancements and the development of new theoretical systems, coming to terms with the emotional and existential repercussions of the shattering of old beliefs can have profound effects upon one's physical and emotional well-being.