Melancholy I-II
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Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild, feverish narrative, Jon 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, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady’s daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion 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 – a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness. Published here in one volume in English for the first time, Melancholy I-II is a major novel by ‘the Beckett of the twenty-first century’ (Le Monde).
Jon Fosse
Jon Fosse is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2023. Jon Fosse's work includes novels, poetry, essays and books for children. He is one of the most produced playwrights in Europe and his plays have been translated into more than forty languages. Methuen Drama publishes Plays One (Someone Is Going to Come, The Name, The Guitar Man, The Child), Plays Three (Mother and Child, Sleep my Baby Sleep, Afternoon, Beautiful, Death Variations), Plays Four (And We'll Never Be Parted, The Son, Visits, Meanwhile the Lights Go Down and Everything Becomes Black), Plays Five (Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, A Red Butterfly's Wing, Warm, Telemakos, Sleep), Nightsongs, The Girl on the Sofa and I Am The Wind. Fosse was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007 and received The International Ibsen Award in 2010.
More by Jon Fosse
Damion Searls
Translated by
Grethe Kvernes
Translated by
Grethe Kvernes is a native of Samnanger, Western Norway, one county over from where Fosse grew up. She studied translation with William Weaver at Bard College, and currently lives with her family in upstate New York.
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