Niels Lyhne

A boy grows up dreaming, and loses his mother, his faith and the women he loves in turn, dying without ever becoming the poet he was certain he was. Jens Peter Jacobsen was a botanist who translated Darwin into Danish and died at thirty-eight; Rilke carried this book about with him and called it one of the two he could not do without. It is the novel that taught northern Europe how to write an inner life.