Lamento
£12.00
Madame Nielsen, trans. Gaye Kynoch
Winner of an English Pen Translates Award
‘Love doesn’t have a language; it’s an animal, it’s theatre of cruelty, it’s borderline madness, it’s the sublime and is incapable of articulation. It’s only long afterwards, once all hope is at an end and the two of you in a sense no longer exist, once you are dead, that it can be told.’
Lamento is a love story that questions the possibility of reconciling the magic of infatuation with everyday life. The story begins with a fire – an image which permeates the novel. The narrator, a writer, meets a theatre artist; their love feels ecstatic and utopian, completely untouched by the outside world.
With the birth of a child, the weight of the everyday turns their passion destructive. The woman fights for every minute she can to write, while the man abandons family life to focus on his art. Their private drama is further confronted by the jagged realities of colonialism and injustice, forcing them to see themselves as part of a violent history they cannot escape. As love turns to hate, we follow their restless search to understand the enigma of love.
In a startling act of reverse auto-fiction, Madame Nielsen – a legendary figure of the Danish avant-garde – inhabits the voice of the woman she once loved to interrogate the man she once was. The result is an unsparing reconciliation of gender and memory, a lament that strips away self-pity to expose the narcissistic cost of creative obsession, and a meditation on how gender alters our experience of the world.
‘Reading Madame Nielsen’s masterfully written and haunting novel Lamento is like drowning in honey with a flail in your mouth.’– Christian Kracht
Publishes on 9 July. Available to pre-order now.
Description
‘Love doesn’t have a language; it’s an animal, it’s theatre of cruelty, it’s borderline madness, it’s the sublime and is incapable of articulation. It’s only long afterwards, once all hope is at an end and the two of you in a sense no longer exist, once you are dead, that it can be told.’
Lamento is a love story that questions the possibility of reconciling the magic of infatuation with everyday life. The story begins with a fire – an image which permeates the novel. The narrator, a writer, meets a theatre artist; their love feels ecstatic and utopian, completely untouched by the outside world.
With the birth of a child, the weight of the everyday turns their passion destructive. The woman fights for every minute she can to write, while the man abandons family life to focus on his art. Their private drama is further confronted by the jagged realities of colonialism and injustice, forcing them to see themselves as part of a violent history they cannot escape. As love turns to hate, we follow their restless search to understand the enigma of love.
In a startling act of reverse auto-fiction, Madame Nielsen – a legendary figure of the Danish avant-garde – inhabits the voice of the woman she once loved to interrogate the man she once was. The result is an unsparing reconciliation of gender and memory, a lament that strips away self-pity to expose the narcissistic cost of creative obsession, and a meditation on how gender alters our experience of the world.
‘Reading Madame Nielsen’s masterfully written and haunting novel Lamento is like drowning in honey with a flail in your mouth.’– Christian Kracht
‘Lamento: all one could ask from prose, and so much more. Razor-sharp, devastating, lucid – what a voice, what a generous gift to the English readers.’– Maria Stepanova
‘In this searing work of autofiction, celebrated in the original Danish and now in a luminous English translation by Gaye Kynoch, Madame Nielsen places the artist’s life in a crucible and turns up the heat. By turns defiant and vivid, smouldering and tender, Lamento will captivate any reader who has ever had the misfortune to fall in love.’ – Nancy Campbell
‘Lamento is an incisive portrayal of a tenderness that evolves into something outside of oneself – obsession and absence, the sacrifices and privileges of artmaking and caretaking. In transforming both personal and relational narrative through the duality of love’s witness, Nielsen tracks with vivid intensity the shifting desires of life.’ – Peter Scalpello
‘A love story close to perfection… Sublime, virtuoso, and terrifying.’ – Berlingske
‘Nielsen, the great Danish author, finds a beguiling language for love, hate and everything in between.’ – Welt am Sonntag
‘A first-person novel about how it may have been to be married to the man she once was. Lamento is a genuinely sorrowful book… both self-obsessed and self-tormenting.’ – Information
‘A beautiful elegy most wonderfully written… Moods and sensations transmit themselves to the reader’s flesh, while the question of love continues to burn.’ – Politiken
Madame Nielsen is a novelist, artist, performer, world history enactor, composer, chanteuse – and multi-gendered. In a previous life christened as Claus Beck-Nielsen in 1963 in Tønder, Denmark, she and her ancestors are the authors of numerous literary works. A pioneer of ‘performative biographies’ and ‘Scandinavian autofiction’, the artist declared the death of Claus Beck-Nielsen in 2001, published Claus Beck-Nielsen (1963-2001) A Biography, followed by The Suicide Mission, reappeard in 2013 and continues to work as Madame Nielsen. They were thrice nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize,The Endless Summer became Madame Nielsen’s international break-through and was a bestseller in Germany. Her work has been translated into nine languages.
Gaye Kynoch is a literary translator whose extensive portfolio spans works of theatre and fiction, plus books, essays and articles across the arts and humanities. A long-term collaborator with Madame Nielsen, Kynoch has translated a wide range of Nielsen’s work, including plays, song lyrics and prose. She approaches translation with a musician’s ear, treating the text as a complex orchestral score – a philosophy that allows her to navigate the intricate rhythms, literary references and philosophical motifs central to Nielsen’s prose.
