SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 129
linguistic environment whose circling movement gradually forces the reader to experience the
temporal and emotional logic of that consciousness from within.
Many novels about madness ultimately remain observational. Melancholy I-II does not.
Fosse builds a prose architecture capable of rendering consciousness before the boundary
between perception and reality has fully stabilized. His sentences do not explain psychic
experience. They reproduce its patterned pressure directly on the reader’s attention.
That is why the novel lingers with unusual force. The experience of reading Melancholy
I-II is not primarily interpretive. It is participatory. One leaves the novel feeling less as though
one has understood Hertervig than as though one has temporarily inhabited the looping
machinery of his mind.
Reviewed by
Raúl Rodríguez Calvoz
Editor-in-Chief
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