MELANCHOLY I & II

A breakthrough two-part work by Norwegian Nobel laureate Fosse, appearing in English in one volume for the first time.

First published in 1995 and 1996, Fosse’s Melancholy novels predate his much-admired Septology books, his best-known work among English readers. Fans of those books will detect the emergence of his signature style here—recursive, musical, stream-of-consciousness prose that circles hawklike over themes of art, faith, and death. Fosse’s subject is Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), a painter who specialized in cloud-thickened, surrealistic landscapes. In the opening section, set in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1853, he’s an art student anxious about his teacher’s opinion of his work, his fellow students’ esteem, and his imminent eviction because of his relationship with his landlord’s 15-year-old daughter. His mind tunnels obsessively into factual details and imaginary attacks (“black and white clothes are racing toward me at high speed, here they come, and the black and white clothes move around me, right up close to me”), suggesting an imminent breakdown. Subsequent chapters feature Lars back in Norway three years later, committed to an asylum; an author not unlike Fosse in 1991 contemplating writing a novel about Lars, whom he calls a distant relative; and, concluding the book, Lars’ sister, Oline, back in his hometown, as Lars seems overtaken by madness while a brother of theirs is on his deathbed. The mood throughout is grim, befitting the title (“melancholia” was Lars’ formal diagnosis), and Fosse routinely swings the narrative around the uglier parts of human behavior—rage, pedophilia, scatology. None of that, though, feels gratuitous, and everything speaks to a larger theme of desperation, about how Lars’ urge to make art evokes our need for wholeness and salvation, even if it’s inevitably just out of reach.

A somber, lyrical meditation on fine art and base emotions.