Melancholy I-II

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature

Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness & 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 & enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig's fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations & with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, & 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).

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Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway & is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway & abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, & over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays & prose which give voice to the unsayable’. 

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, & Dutch, & a writer in English. He has translated nine books by Jon Fosse, including the three books of Septology.

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, & currently lives with her family in upstate New