Description
A French woman haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer who is obsessed with Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, flies home with her lively sister and a volume of Adorno's letters to Thomas Mann. While the impossible heroine unpicks her social failures the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg's passionate, chilling blue. A novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. Noemi Lefebvre shows how music continues to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures.
Sophie Lewis is a literary editor and translator from French and Portuguese into English. While Senior Editor at fiction publisher And Other Stories, she edited authors both writing in English and in translation, including Deborah Levy, Lina Wolff and Juan Pablo Villalobos. She has translated Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Ayme, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano and Joao Gilberto Noll, among others. In 2017 she was commended for the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of "Heloise Is Bald" by Emilie de Turkheim (Jonathan Cape) and has recently been longlisted for the International Booker Prize for their translation of Emmanuelle Pagano's Faces on the Tip of my Tongue.
About the Author
Noemi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She holds a PhD. in music education and national identity in Germany and France, and she currently teaches music research methodology at university. Her four novels have been critically acclaimed in France and her UK debut, Blue Self-Portrait (2017), received intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Lefebvre is a regular contributor to Mediapart and the bilingual French-German literary review La mer gelee. Together with sound designer Laurent Grappe, Lefebvre has produced several short videos of mock-Socratic dialogues available on YouTube, including the tantalising 'We Are We', commissioned by the Goethe Institut about Brexit.
Reviews
'These subjects, ranging from anxiety that his sexual desirability is dependent on his girlfriend imagining she's sleeping with the next Schoenberg, to the paralysing effect of nazism on art, to beautiful insights into the compositional process, ensure that the book is no melancholic meditation on lost loves. For a comparatively short novel, 'Blue Self-Portrait' yokes together an extraordinary profusion of ideas.' -- Eimear McBride. 'Were we to note the musical expression with which Blue Self-Portrait is performed, it would be con bravura, or even staccato: unchained, wildly.' -- BOMB -- 'Contemporary gender relations get a thorough going-over in this short, brilliant, variously funny and furious debut novel (...) Like an application of the prose style of Thomas Bernhard to a particular female experience more reminiscent of Bridget Jones: a form of acute social embarrassment and chronic self-deprecation. The strength of Lefebvre's novel is that it holds this private anxiety in balance not just with the highbrow cultural references of a well-educated European elite (Brecht, Mann and Adorno all get nods) but with the trauma of the Continent's recent history.' - Times Literary Supplement 'We are in Berlin, we are in France, we are in a plane; we are between countries and places and present and past, we are between different minds and different moments... Lefebvre's narrative is rich and engaging, and Lewis' translation - which I imagine must have been a tough one to do - never falters for a moment. This is a weighty, literary, text, and other than length it is not a "small" book. It is ideas and emotion-rich, and for anyone else who's all into this contemporary stream of consciousness revival, it's definitely worth your time.' Scott Manley Hadley, The Triumph of Now; 'As the plot unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions Lefebvre's musical prose reflects the multidisciplinary approach of the artist it pays homage to.' Big Issue North; " 'L'autoportrait bleu' calls to mind fine lacework, all fancy stitching, a delicate succession of interconnected loops. Nothing but beautiful work here. In this devilishly virtuosic text, which also evokes contrapuntal music, Noemi Lefebvre writes like a genuine composer. It's rare to find a writer successfully able to lend a musical shape to their text. Lefebvre has taken up the challenge in this astonishing, vertiginous account." (Le Figaro litteraire,10 best debut novels of 2009) "The dense, fine-tuned, ever perfectionist writing in this debut novel reinforce its immediacy, grips the reader to the point of obsession." (L'Humanite) "I think this may be a 'master(?)piece." (Charles Boyle, author and publisher)
Awards
Short-listed for Scott Moncrieff Prize 2019 and The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2018.
Book Information
ISBN 9780993009327
Author Noemi Lefebvre
Format Paperback
Page Count 162
Imprint Les Fugitives
Publisher Les Fugitives
Sophie Lewis is a literary editor and translator from French and Portuguese into English. While Senior Editor at fiction publisher And Other Stories, she edited authors both writing in English and in translation, including Deborah Levy, Lina Wolff and Juan Pablo Villalobos. She has translated Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Ayme, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano and Joao Gilberto Noll, among others. In 2017 she was commended for the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of "Heloise Is Bald" by Emilie de Turkheim (Jonathan Cape) and has recently been longlisted for the International Booker Prize for their translation of Emmanuelle Pagano's Faces on the Tip of my Tongue.
About the Author
Noemi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She holds a PhD. in music education and national identity in Germany and France, and she currently teaches music research methodology at university. Her four novels have been critically acclaimed in France and her UK debut, Blue Self-Portrait (2017), received intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Lefebvre is a regular contributor to Mediapart and the bilingual French-German literary review La mer gelee. Together with sound designer Laurent Grappe, Lefebvre has produced several short videos of mock-Socratic dialogues available on YouTube, including the tantalising 'We Are We', commissioned by the Goethe Institut about Brexit.
Reviews
'These subjects, ranging from anxiety that his sexual desirability is dependent on his girlfriend imagining she's sleeping with the next Schoenberg, to the paralysing effect of nazism on art, to beautiful insights into the compositional process, ensure that the book is no melancholic meditation on lost loves. For a comparatively short novel, 'Blue Self-Portrait' yokes together an extraordinary profusion of ideas.' -- Eimear McBride. 'Were we to note the musical expression with which Blue Self-Portrait is performed, it would be con bravura, or even staccato: unchained, wildly.' -- BOMB -- 'Contemporary gender relations get a thorough going-over in this short, brilliant, variously funny and furious debut novel (...) Like an application of the prose style of Thomas Bernhard to a particular female experience more reminiscent of Bridget Jones: a form of acute social embarrassment and chronic self-deprecation. The strength of Lefebvre's novel is that it holds this private anxiety in balance not just with the highbrow cultural references of a well-educated European elite (Brecht, Mann and Adorno all get nods) but with the trauma of the Continent's recent history.' - Times Literary Supplement 'We are in Berlin, we are in France, we are in a plane; we are between countries and places and present and past, we are between different minds and different moments... Lefebvre's narrative is rich and engaging, and Lewis' translation - which I imagine must have been a tough one to do - never falters for a moment. This is a weighty, literary, text, and other than length it is not a "small" book. It is ideas and emotion-rich, and for anyone else who's all into this contemporary stream of consciousness revival, it's definitely worth your time.' Scott Manley Hadley, The Triumph of Now; 'As the plot unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions Lefebvre's musical prose reflects the multidisciplinary approach of the artist it pays homage to.' Big Issue North; " 'L'autoportrait bleu' calls to mind fine lacework, all fancy stitching, a delicate succession of interconnected loops. Nothing but beautiful work here. In this devilishly virtuosic text, which also evokes contrapuntal music, Noemi Lefebvre writes like a genuine composer. It's rare to find a writer successfully able to lend a musical shape to their text. Lefebvre has taken up the challenge in this astonishing, vertiginous account." (Le Figaro litteraire,10 best debut novels of 2009) "The dense, fine-tuned, ever perfectionist writing in this debut novel reinforce its immediacy, grips the reader to the point of obsession." (L'Humanite) "I think this may be a 'master(?)piece." (Charles Boyle, author and publisher)
Awards
Short-listed for Scott Moncrieff Prize 2019 and The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2018.
Book Information
ISBN 9780993009327
Author Noemi Lefebvre
Format Paperback
Page Count 162
Imprint Les Fugitives
Publisher Les Fugitives
