Stangerup, Henrik.
Description
From Library Journal With Brother Jacob , Stangerup has completed his Kierkegaard trilogy of the three stages on life's road: the ethical, the aesthet
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ic, and the religious. The earlier novels were The Road to Lagoa Santa ( LJ 1/84) and The Seducer (Boyars, 1990). This book is a fictional re-creation of the life of a Franciscan Renaissance monk, son of a Danish king, who studies in Paris, becomes a friar and administrator in Denmark, and flees to Mexico when the Reformation outlaws his order in northern Europe. Inspired by his contemporaries Erasmus and Thomas More, he builds hospitals and monasteries modeled on More's Utopia and becomes a radical champion of the Tarask Indians. Insisting on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety, he strives to unite Franciscan Catholicism with Tarask tradition and mysticism. A scrupulous scholar, Strangerup paints a vast panorama of Humanism and the Reformation as well as the religious and political strife in Europe and the New World. In the end, Brother Jacob emerges as a good, pure, life-affirming, St. Francis-like figure. This highly rewarding novel is not easy to read, but Stangerup's trilogy should be in all serious fiction collections.- Ulla Sweedler, Univ. of California at San Diego Lib.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description A Denmark best-seller features a real-life human experience of God in history as Brother Jacob flees to Mexico in search of his own Utopia, establishes hospitals, and champions the rights of the Amerindians before his faith is put to a final test. From Publishers Weekly With this historical novel, a bestseller in his native country, Danish writer Stangerup completes a trilogy grounded in the "stages on life's way"--aesthetic, ethical, and religious--identified by Kierkegaard. His protagonist--an actual figure, meticulously fictionalized--is a brother of King Christian II of Denmark who becomes a Franciscan friar at the time of the Lutheran Reformation. Dextrously moving from hagiography to as-told-to autobiography, Stangerup chronicles Jacob's search for a truly religious Christianity. After joining the Franciscan order, Jacob is educated in Paris, which is embroiled in theological controversy; later the Franciscans are expelled from newly Lutheran Denmark, and Jacob and his brothers travel to Spain, which is rife with anti-Semitism and overrun with rule-bound monasteries. Inspired by Erasmus's Christian humanism and Thomas More's Utopia , Jacob sets out for New Spain, where he founds churches and monasteries, campaigns for the natives' right to be ordained as priests and is revered as a saint upon his death. Stangerup's brilliance is manifest in every line of his vigorously translated prose, as is his copious research. But while Brother Jacob struggles to escape his willful personality, in which "everything is turned into 'I' and 'I' and 'I,' " that personality never fully emerges from the crowds of arcane facts that surround it. In his fidelity to history, Stangerup has produced a work that demands from the reader the patience of a saint. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Danish writer Stangerup completes a trilogy here--a set of works based on Kierkegaard's understanding of the Tripartite Man. The Road to Lagoa Santa (1984) represented, with its main character Peter Lund, the ``ethical man''; Peter Moller in The Seducer (1990) stood in for the ``aesthetical man''; and now Stangerup comes to the ``religious man''--choosing not Kierkegaard himself (too daunting) but the 16th-century Franciscan Brother Jacob, son of Queen Christine and King Hans of Denmark. When Lutheranism topples the Catholic monarchy, the monasteries are closed and the monks go underground or leave the country. Jacob, an especially independent-minded man, can't see himself yoked to the sterility of the monastic orders in Italy or Spain yet can't abide the Reformation either--and so, in sear
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