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.”
- ISBN13 9781564784513
- Publish Date 14 December 2006
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 27 January 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Dalkey Archive Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 296
- Language English