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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."