Kongens Fald

Johannes V. Jensen's masterpiece follows Mikkel Thøgersen, a young farmer's son who leaves his provincial life to study in Copenhagen at the close of the fifteenth century. Over four decades spanning 1497 to 1535, Mikkel drifts through a Denmark in violent transformation: the Renaissance arriving from the south, the Church weakening, and King Christian II ascending and falling in blood and exile. Mikkel is no hero. He is small, uncertain, sometimes cruel, occasionally tender. He watches the king he adores destroyed. He loves without grace. He survives. What makes this novel extraordinary is Jensen's radical insight: history is not made by extraordinary men but experienced by ordinary ones, absorbed quietly, incompletely, through the body and the senses. The three parts structure the narrative as seasons, spring dying into a great summer of hope and violence, then winter. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Jensen crafted in Kongens Fald a work that Danish readers twice voted the century's finest novel.