Blue Self-Portrait

by Noémi Lefebvre, Sophie Lewis (Translator)

Overview

Indie Next Selection

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945492105
Publisher:	Transit Books
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Noémi 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 Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, and João Gilberto Noll, among others.

Interviews

Noémi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She studied music for over 10 years as a child and later obtained her PhD 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: her debut novel L'Autoportrait bleu"(2009), L'etat des sentiments a l'age adulte (2012) and L'enfance politique (2015). She is a regular contributor to the respected French investigative website Mediapart and to the bilingual French-German review La mer gelee.

Editorial Reviews

"Blue Self-Portrait wraps its difficulties in mercurial humor and wordplay, gamely translated from the French by Sophie Lewis. It’s inviting enough to read and re-read, and dense enough to provoke different responses each time."—The Wall Street Journal

"Blue Self-Portrait is inventive and funny—as well as clever—cycling at breakneck speed through the atrocities of the 20th century."—The Millions

"Blue Self-Portrait may be the antidote to our condition of having too many things on the mind."—KQED

"Blue Self-Portrait glances askance at the mythos of male genius and the mute, compliant notion of womanhood on which it relies."—Public Books

"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel."—Publishers Weekly

"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, The Guardian

From the Publisher