Lamento

How does infatuation become love? And when does the flame extinguish?

Lamento is an artist’s novel which tells the story of a doomed love affair in an entirely unexpected way, lamenting the impossibility of reconciling the magic of infatuation with everyday life. The novel begins with a fire and the fire permeates the entire novel. The narrator, a writer, meets a playwright and theatre producer. They fall in love, spend every minute together, completely untouched by the outside world.

But when they finally have a child and everyday life stifles the passion, the love turns destructive. The woman fights for every minute she can to write, while the man turns his back on 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. Ultimately, everything breaks down; love turns to hate.

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, in a ritualistic trial of a former self. 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.