Melancholy (novel)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Melancholy, originally titled Melancholia I, is a 1995 Norwegian novel by Jon Fosse. It follows painter Lars Hertervig (1830–1902) as a young student in Düsseldorf, where he is overwhelmed by unrequited love and doubts about his art, and is driven toward a mental breakdown. The book won the Melsom Prize and the Sunnmøre Prize. A sequel, Melancholy II, appeared in 1996 and takes place on the day of Hertervig’s death. The first part inspired the 2008 opera Melancholia by Georg Friedrich Haas. Publishers Weekly, in 2006, described the book as a wild, stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows Hertervig’s mind as a single day leads to his breakdown. While the prose can feel childlike, the book contains many beautiful passages and explores the idea of a “glimmer of the divine” in art.