Pelle the Conqueror: Complete edition (Parts I to IV)
About this audiobook
Martin Andersen Nexo breakthrough work, the Danish classic Pelle the Conqueror, appeared between 1906 (Part I) and 1910 (Part IV).
It tells the story of Pelle, a poor boy, whose life in Part I shares much similarities with Nexø's. "The great charm of the book lies in the fact that the writer knows the poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next, sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would be content to work out into long chapters or whole volumes.
His sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves." (Otto Jespersen) "Pelle" has conquered the hearts of the reading public of Denmark and of the world. The first part of the book was filmed by Bille August; in 1989 the film won the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film.
About the author
Martin Andersen Nexø was born into a large family (the fourth of eleven children) in Christianshavn, at the time an impoverished district of Copenhagen. In 1877 his family moved to Nexø on Bornholm, and he adopted the name of this town as his last name. Having been an industrial worker before, in Nexø he attended a folk high school, and later worked as a journalist. He spent the mid-1890s travelling in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) is largely based on those travels. Like many of his literary contemporaries, including Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Nexø was at first heavily influenced by fin-de-siècle pessimism, but gradually turned to a more extroverted view, joining the Social Democratic movement and later the Communist Party of Denmark; his later books reflect his political support of the Soviet Union.
Pelle the Conqueror, published in four volumes 1906–1910, is his best-known work and the one most translated. Its first section was made the subject of the DDR-FS movie Pelle der Eroberer in 1986 and the movie Pelle Erobreren in 1987. Ditte Menneskebarn, written from 1917 to 1921, praises the working woman for her self-sacrifice; a Danish film version of the first part of the book was released in 1946 as Ditte, Child of Man. The much-debated Midt i en Jærntid, written in 1929, satirises the Danish farmers of World War I. During his latter years, 1944 to 1956, Nexø wrote but did not complete a trilogy consisting of the books Morten hin Røde, Den fortabte generation, and Jeanette. This was ostensibly a continuation of Pelle the Conqueror, but also a masked autobiography. In 1941, during Denmark's occupation by the Germany, Danish police arrested Nexø due to his communist affiliation. Upon his release he traveled to neutral Sweden and then to the Soviet Union, where he made broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Denmark and Norway.
After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was made an honorary citizen. Nexø died in Dresden in 1954 and was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro neighbourhood of Copenhagen.
