Lise Mundus awakens after abandonment by her husband Vilhelm, a celebrity newspaper editor, and places a lonely hearts advertisement from a psychiatric ward. A malicious neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, shows the ad to her young lodger Kurt, who moves into Lise's flat but encounters her indifferent, inward focus. Lise remains entirely absorbed by memories of Vilhelm and by plans to commit suicide; the novel reveals her death in its opening pages. The narrative repeatedly blurs the boundary between first-person voice and external observation, and the fiction exhibits strong autobiographical echoes, including an edited real lonely hearts ad.
From a bed in a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad: Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage aged 51, but youthful in spirit wonderful son, aged 15 household literary name summerhouse large flat in the city centre temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown prefers a motorist. The ad is seized upon by Lise's malicious upstairs neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, who shows it to her young lodger/lover, Kurt, hoping he can financially exploit Lise.
The book also deliberately elides the distinction between author and character. Sometimes Lise is a first-person narrator, but, from one word to the next, the I can become that of someone discussing a Lise who is already dead. In a typically jarring shift, we get: Only one [photograph] have I kept: the photograph of Vilhelm and Lise at the top of Himmelbjerget. We are young and happy
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