MELANCHOLY

"I got sick from painting, because I stared at landscapes in the sun. And that's why I got sick, I'm sure of it. And I cant' sleep either. That's also probably why I got sick. I listen to the seagulls. I watch the seagulls."
—page 187, Melancholy by Jon Fosse

Lars Hertervig is having a bad day. He is stuck in his obsessive thoughts. He repeats scenes over and over in his head until they become overwhelming, paralyzing. Then the black and white clothes come floating toward him, surround him, close in and smother him. The clothes move back ever so slightly and move in again. They depart when Lars begins to gain some control over the thoughts. He begins to obsess over the same thoughts, the same scenes again, with only slight variation. He does progress through the thoughts, however. It is just that he plays them out so many times in his head that we see them from angles that are just slightly askew from one another. It is like a kaleidoscope of thought, and we are moving through his mind with him.

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"There are readers who simply can't get enough of novels with unreliable narrators, beautiful sentences packed with vivid, poetic prose, and lofty themes about the power of language and society's collective ennui. And there are other readers who prefer a nice, juicy murder."
—Chris Bolton, in his review, "Guilt-free Pleasures," of The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction by Patrick Anderson, on Powells.com

I am the former type of reader. Melancholy is the former type of book. Jon Fosse's book, as translated from Norwegian into English by Grethe Kvernes and Damion Searls, is "beautiful sentences packed with vivid, poetic prose." Sentences alternate between those that are short, staccato, and those that gather up pieces from the short into a longer passage. This rhythm keeps us in the disturbed mind of Lars, without drowning us in Lars's own paranoia and obsession.

The first portion of the book takes place on a single day in 1853 Düsseldorf. Not much happens as far as movement is concerned. Lars is supposed to meet up with his mentor, the painter Hans Gude, at the studio where Lars paints as part of a school of painters. Instead, he gets thrown out of the room he rents because he has fallen in love with the fifteen-year old girl from whose mother he rents the room. He wanders down to the bar, Malkasten, where the other painters hang out. Then, after a while he wanders back to his former place of residence, only to be escorted in police presence.

During all of this, Lars fears meeting up with Hans Gude because he fears how Hans will judge his painting. Lars is sure he will be sent back to his hometown of Stavanger to end up as a house painter. Yet, Lars also insists to us that only he and Hans and one other painter, Tidemann, can paint. Lars obsesses about the girl Helene, even though their only contact has been the two of them hugging, perhaps twice, and him smelling her hair. Yet, Lars is ready to marry the girl. The other painters at the bar take advantage of Lars, or so it seems. They may be joking with him and he simply doesn't know how to handle it, to process it.

The stability of Lars's mind is certainly questionable since he inflates and deflates events and scenes into things they may not necessarily be. I guess one question for me is: what does it say about my own mental state, when I can empathize with Lars at many points? And another: why is this book so compelling? I know that one piece is the rhythm of language that is sets up. It is hypnotic. But, there has to be more to it than that. Perhaps, Jon Fosse has tapped in to pieces of obsession and insecurity that we all, or at least I, possess.

I will let you know more after part two of the novel...