About the work
“Lamento” is a novel by the Danish writer and artist Madame Nielsen (born Claus Beck-Nielsen in Aarhus in 1963), published in 2020 by the Danish publisher Grif. The German translation by Hannes Langendörfer appeared with Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2022, and an English translation by Gaye Kynoch followed from Prototype Publishing. A stage version subtitled “Selbstauslöschung 1” (Self-Extinction 1) is set to premiere on 20 October 2026 in the Dunkelkammer of Vienna’s Volkstheater, directed by Barbara Weber.
Plot
A young woman writer meets a young theatre maker at the premiere of one of her plays, and the two fall in love at once. After marriage and the birth of a child, everyday life wears down their passion: she fights for time to write, while he withdraws into his art and away from the family until the relationship breaks apart. The story is told from the woman’s perspective, with fire as a recurring motif running through the text.
Cultural significance
The novel is described as reversed autofiction: Madame Nielsen lends her voice to the woman she once loved and thereby questions the man she herself used to be. German-language critics, including the NZZ, Die Zeit and Deutschlandfunk, reviewed the book favourably in 2022 as a musically structured text between realism and surrealism about how love turns into hate.