The councilor was a friend of nature, nature was something quite special, nature was one of the finest ornaments of existence. The councilor patronized nature, he defended it against the artificial; gardens were nothing but nature spoiled; but gardens laid out in elaborate style were nature turned crazy. There was no style in nature, providence had wisely made nature natural, nothing but natural. Nature was that which was unrestrained, that which was unspoiled. But with the fall of man civilization had come upon mankind; now civilization had become a necessity; but it would have been better, if it had not been thus. The state of nature was something quite different, quite different. The councilor himself would have had no objection to maintaining himself by going about in a coat of lamb-skin and shooting hares and snipes and golden plovers and grouse and haunches of venison and wild boars. No, the state of nature really was like a gem, a perfect gem. With a unique structure, an ingenious plot and so much suspense you can’t put it down, this is the very epitome of a must-read’ Heat

Elusive online journalist Scott King investigates the murder of a teenager at an outward bound centre, in the first episode of the critically acclaimed, international bestselling Six Stories series… Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference And, if you were an author, how would you like to have these other folks writing blurbs for you? Sigmund Freud: …Jacobsen has made a profound impression on my heart. Hermann Hesse: …powerful imagination…huge talent. Thomas Mann: Jacobsen had the greatest influence on my style…Like many others, I read it because it is recommended by Rainer Maria Rilke in his book - Letters to a Young Poet. My kindle version had 4 stories and not 6 and I liked 'Mogens' the most and then 'Mrs Fonss'. Let me tell you that I did not like the book for the stories but I loved it for the way it has been written. Jacobsen's writing style is highly poetic and he creates a scene with such a great beauty and with so minute details that you can visualize the whole scene exactly and would feel as if you are actually living it. No, he had never had any special feeling for places and countries; he thought it was only his daily work which he missed.

A relentless and original work of modern rural noir which beguiles and unnerves in equal measure. Matt Wesolowski is a major talent’ Eva Dolan The stories are startling too. The title story, Mogens, is a long short story [is that an oxymoron?] almost a novella. A groom loses his beloved in a tragedy. It has such an impact on him that it reshapes his personality and his life. He becomes “…obsessed with the idea that he has been personally insulted by life.” The Instant of Knowing, Library of Congress, 1974, reprinted as The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism, and Occasional Prose, edited by Elizabeth Spires, University of Michigan Press, 1997. Oh, more than enough sometimes—much too much! And when shape and color and movement are so lovely and so fleeting and a strange world lies behind all this and lives and rejoices and desires and can express all this in voice and song, then you feels so lonely, that you cannot come closer to this world, and life grows lusterless and burdensome."[6] In fact, it was this dual passion for the scientific study of Nature and his poetic longing to express "Nature's eternal laws" that formed his unique writing style. Jacobsen comes at a time where the Romantic era of metaphoric and extravagant depictions of nature had run its course and the era of Realism was longed for.In Two Worlds, a woman makes a charm to transfer her illness to another woman through a curse. It works. It turns out that isn’t good news. All text from the above passages of "Mogens" are taken from Anna Grabow's 1921 translation of Jacobsen's short stories: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6765/6765-h/6765-h.htm Jacobsen was born in Thisted in Jutland, the eldest of the five children of a prosperous merchant. He went to school in Copenhagen and was a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1868. As a boy, he showed a remarkable talent for science, in particular botany. In 1870, although he was already secretly writing poetry, Jacobsen adopted botany as a profession. He was sent by a scientific body in Copenhagen to report on the flora of the islands of Anholt and Læsø. I had this short book on my TBR pile for years and finally read it a few years ago after that blurb caught my eye. A few weeks ago I happened to be reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and I saw that his detailed comments about Jacobsen were even more enthusiastic: There was a swishing of wind in the gable-windows, in the poplars of the manor-house; the wind whistled through tattered bushes on the green hill of Bredbjerg. Mogens lay up there, and gazed out over the dark earth. The moon was beginning to acquire radiance, and mists were drifting down on the meadow. Everything was very sad, all of life, all of life, empty behind him, dark before him. But such was life. Those who were happy were also blind. Through misfortune he had learned to see; everything was full of injustice and lies, the entire earth was a huge, rotting lie; faith, friendship, mercy, a lie it was, a lie was each and everything; but that which was called love, it was the hollowest of all hollow things, it was lust, flaming lust, glimmering lust, smoldering lust, but lust and nothing else. Why had he to know this? Why had he not been permitted to hold fast to his faith in all these gilded lies? Why was he compelled to see while the others remained blind? He had a right to blindness, he had believed in everything in which it was possible to believe.