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MelancholyAuthor: Jon Fosse Translators: Grethe Kvernes and Damion Searls Scandinavian Literature Series November 2006 296 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 paperback, 1-56478-451-7 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.16 
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Book 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."
About the Author
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Called "the new Ibsen" in the German press, and heralded throughout Western Europe, Jon Fosse is one of contemporary Norwegian literature's most important writers. Born in 1959, he has published some thirty books of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction since 1983. In 2000, Melancholy won the Melsom Prize, and Fosse was awarded a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government for his future literary efforts. This fall, one of his plays will be performed in New York. Grethe Kvernes attended Bard College, where she studied translation. Damion Searls has translated books by Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson. |
About the Translators
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Grethe Kvernes attended Bard College, where she studied translation. |
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Damion Searls has translated books by Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson. |
Praise
"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