RRP: £9.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: November 2018
ISBN: 9780946162901
PAGES: 124
Hans Christian Andersen
A Story from the Dunes and other stories
Translated with an afterword by Paul Binding
Like The Ice Virgin, this novella unites the immediacy of the fairy-tale and the novel’s concern with social perspectives. It was published in 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species. A son of high-ranking Spanish parents is born out of shipwreck and lives his life in an alien country without knowledge of his origins.
In the context of the new Darwinian interpretations of human existence, and with the unforgiving setting of the remote fishing community of northern Jutland, Andersen tells a moving story of a life in which the fittest does not survive. Andersen, a passionate believer in the soul, found meaning not in challenges to Christian belief but in ordinary and obscure lives.
Three further stories present the everyday world with gentle touches of fantasy: a demonstration of the arbitrariness of social position; a delightful squib on the literary life; and an elegiac tale which is probably Andersen’s last.
‘A Story from the Dunes has a musicality as if an ebbing and flowing storm were recounting the narrative, and Andersen dedicated it to the Danish composer Johann Peter Emilius Hartmann.’ Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (1805–75) was born in Odense, then the second city of Denmark, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. His father died when he was eleven. He left home for Copenhagen at the age of fourteen in an unsuccessful attempt at a career on the stage. He managed to complete secondary education in his early twenties. After early difficulties with social acceptance as a young man, he travelled widely throughout Europe and met and befriended many writers and artists of the day. His writings outside the fairy-tale genre include novels, novellas and stories, travelogues, autobiographies and stage works.