Melancholy I-II by Jon Fosse

Melancholy I-II by Jon Fosse

Melancholy I-IIis a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902.

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

‘Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.’
— New York Times

‘Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.’
— Nordic Council Literary Prize

‘It is desperately poignant…Melancholy I-II is a difficult but deep book…It is essential for understanding his major themes and the evolution of [Fosse’s] technique and artistic vision.’
— Rónán Hession, Irish Times

‘Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative.’
— Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears (Praise for Septology)

‘I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’
— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books (Praise for Septology)

‘Septology feels momentous.’
— Catherine Taylor, Guardian (Praise for Septology)

‘Fosse intuitively — and with great artistry — conveys ... a sense of wonder at the unfathomable miracle of life, even in its bleakest and loneliest moments.’
— Bryan Karetnyk, Financial Times (Praise for Septology)

‘The entire septet seems to take place in a state of limbo. ... Though Fosse has largely done away with punctuation altogether, opting instead for sudden line breaks, his dense, sinuous prose is never convoluted, and its effect is mesmerizing.’
— Johanna Elster Hanson, TLS (Praise for Septology)

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781804271018
ISBN 10	1804271012
Title	Melancholy I-II
Author	Jon Fosse
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Year published	2023-11-01
Number of pages	416
Prizes	Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 (Sweden)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.