Portræt af en bedrager: Otto Stein. Med sidelys på Jacob Paludans liv og romankunst by Frantz Leander Hansen (review)

Jørgen Stein, the great novel by Jacob Paludan, contains another, smaller novel, which could be called Otto Stein. In fact, this smaller novel is the greater one. It is better written and more captivating. The narrative of the older brother Otto, who throws himself into the hectic economic and cultural life of the 1920s, has a drive that one misses in the narrative of Jørgen, Otto's weak, irresolute little brother. As a character, the contours of Otto are much more clearly drawn, and Otto's fate is to fall from a much greater height than Jørgen. Hounded by the press and the police, Otto chooses to commit suicide in a "Vandmose" (p. 13) [a watery bog], and here he is irretrievably lost "et Skridt før han havde beregnet" (p. 13) [one step before he had calculated]. Jørgen, less fatally, is characterized as a member of "Aargangen der maatte snuble i Starten" (p. 102) [the generation that stumbled at the start].

Frantz Leander Hansen has written a brilliant book about Otto Stein. As he notes, he is not the first one to observe that Otto is a much more exciting character than Jørgen, but no one has until now taken the consequence of this observation by focusing on the spectacular performances of Otto. Portræt af en bedrager shows how fruitful such a focus may be, opening up a number of new perspectives.

Some of these perspectives are internal to the text itself. Hansen is an acute and penetrating reader, and he is able to show how the opening chapter of the novel presents motifs and metaphors that anticipate the later trajectory of the novel. When Jørgen is on his way to a raft, he sees a dead plaice in the harbor, which is described as "hvid og ubevægelig som et kasseret Kravebryst" (p. 19) [white and motionless as a scrapped shirtfront]. This is an anticipation of Otto's death. In Danish, a "man-about-town" is called a levemand, literally "a living man," but, in this case, he ends up as a very dead man.

Other perspectives are intertextual. Very convincingly, Hansen points to inspiration from Herman Bang, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, in particular, Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of these writers have portrayed impostors, humbugs, and swindlers, often in the ambiguous field between comedy and tragedy, and, as in Dostoevsky, with an emphasis on the ethical dimension.

Dostoevsky is also among the most important examples in René Girard's Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961). In the introduction to his book, Hansen notes that the character of Otto suggests the possibility of a more far-reaching study of "bedragernaturen som sådan" (p. 9) [the nature of the swindler as such], but he does not include Girard's theory of mimetic desire in his efforts to explain the character of Otto. For this reader, Girard would be a good choice to facilitate a more expansive understanding of the swindler as a figure.

Jørgen Stein is known as a generationsroman (a novel of a generation), rather than a karakterroman (a novel of a character). Otto Stein, however, prompts reflection on the relationship between generation and character. The experiences from the First World War undoubtedly inspired Karl Mannheim to develop the first sociological theory of the phenomenon of a generation. As a novel of a generation, Jørgen Stein not only raises the question of the differences between the two brothers, but also the similarities.

It is true, as Hansen observes, that Jørgen clings to his past, whereas Otto wants to join the future as quickly as possible (p. 18). But they are both "children of the century," to use the well-known phrase from the earliest novel of a generation, Alfred Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836; Confession of a Child of the...