Melancholy
Published on 14. December 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
296 pages
978-1-56478-451-3 (ISBN)
Description
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."
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."
Reviews / Votes
"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 * Bergens Tidende * "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." --AftenpostenMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Normal, IL
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 217 mm
Width: 142 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
395 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56478-451-3 (9781564784513)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and has written over thirty books and twenty-eight plays that have been translated into over 40 languages. His first novel, Red, Black, was published in 1983, and was followed by such works as Melancholia I & II,Aliss at the Fire, and Morning and Evening, which are available in translation from Dalkey Archive Press. He is one of the world's most produced living playwrights. In 2007, Fosse became a chevalier of the Ordre national du Merite of France, and he was awarded the International Ibsen Award in 2010. In 2011, he moved into Grotten, an honorary residence for artists on the grounds of the Royal Palace in Oslo. He was awarded the European Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2015. He currently has homes in Bergen, Oslo, and in Hainburg, Austria.