Melancholy [Paperback]

Jon Fosse (Author), Grethe Kvernes (Translator), Damion Searls (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2006

In real life, Lars Hertervig would become, along with Edvard Munch, one of Norway s most renowned painters--but in Melancholy he is a promising young artist tortured by doubt and unhinged by unrequited love. After agonizing over his work, drinking alone in a student bar, and obsessively revisiting the loss of his great love, he quits painting entirely, suffers a nervous collapse, and finds himself incarcerated in an insane asylum. Told with a seamlessly powerful and compulsive voice, the narrator s art becomes, in the end, a means of extricating himself from the tortures of love. "I'll get away from Gaustad Asylum," he says when he's finally released, "and I'll paint your picture away."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild stream-of-consciousness narrative, Fosse delves into Hertervig's mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady's 15-year-old daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion ("I walked into her light") and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig's fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann's apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter. The novel's second section finds Hertervig lost in madness and planning an escape from Gausted Asylum in Norway; a brief and less satisfying coda reveals the life-transforming consequences of Hertervig's art for a late–20th-century writer named Vidme. Fosse's prose, which often affects a childlike quality, might put off some readers, but many gorgeous passages and Fosse's pursuit of the "glimmer of the divine" in art make this a powerful book. (Nov.)
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Review

"What he writes is so simple and so deep at the same time. He has a restlessness, a tension in his narrative style, and he writes about situations everyone feels involved in, no matter where in the world they are." --Bergens Tidende

"His novel presents itself as an exploration of zones that are murky, dangerous, crucial, where craftsmanship and inspiration seek and repulse each other up to the coils of madness. . . . It is the restrained patience and anxiety that shape, beleaguer and design this radiant nucleus that justifies writing--or painting." --Le Monde

"He has a surgeon's ability to use the scalpel and to cut into the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments from life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterwards as a precipitous, West-Norway-colored, feverish dream of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare, sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark, and fearful that Kafka himself would have been frightened." --Aftenposten

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Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (November 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564784517
• ISBN-13: 978-1564784513
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,465,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars do not ignore this title, July 15, 2008

By 

Steven N. Good (pa, usa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Melancholy (Paperback)

I don't want to spend my time writing this review. But I have to counter, the negative review. the book was patient, beautifully vague, and insightful.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor rendition of an interesting story, June 5, 2008

By 

Jose Toledo (Paris, France) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Melancholy (Paperback)

If you want to read repetitive prose that is witty, rhythmic and intelligent pick up any of Gertrude Stein's books. If you want to know what the stream-of-consciousness style is all about refer to Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. This book is a poor and annoying imitation of them. If you take out all the unnecessary, page-filling, repetitions this "novel" would become a pamphlet illustrating the workings of an obsesive, possibly deranged, mind; of interest, perhaps, to pop psychology enthusiasts. The story of Lars Hertervig, Norwegian painter of beautifully luminous landscapes, is lost somewhere in the mind of the author. The "glimmer of light" does not shine through!