Melancholy

Anotace

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...

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."