Staff Pick
Packed with charmingly scatterbrained soliloquies on courtship, composition, art, and fascism, Lefebvre's mile-a-minute novel — her first to be translated into English — yokes the long shadow of the Third Reich to our protagonist's myriad neuroses and mating rituals. Notes collide and multiply, scatter and reappear, coalescing in a madcap amalgam of indelible refrains and crescendos. Blue Self-Portrait is a dizzying work at the vanguard of French fiction. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by composer Arnold Schoenberg's self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a pianist. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection.
Review
"Were we to note the musical expression with which Blue Self-Portrait is performed, it would be con bravura, or even scatenato: unchained, wildly." BOMB Magazine
Review
"These subjects, ranging from anxiety that his sexual desirability is dependent on his girlfriend imagining she’s sleeping with the next Schoenberg, to the paralyzing 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, The Guardian
Review
"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Indie Next Selection/p>
"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel."--Publishers Weekly
On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by composer Arnold Schoenberg's self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a pianist. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection.
About the Author
Noemi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She studied music for over 10 years as a child and later obtained her Ph.D. on the subject of music education and national identity in Germany and France. She became a political scientist at CERAT de Grenoble II Institute. She is the author of three novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success in France.
Sophie Lewis is a literary editor and translator from French and Portuguese into English. She has translated Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Ayme, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, and Joao Gilberto Noll, among others.