Charlotte: A Novel

by David Foenkinos, Sam Taylor

Overview

Obsessed with art, and with living, Charlotte attended school in Germany until it was too dangerous to remain, fled to France, and was interned in a bleak work camp from which she narrowly escaped. Newly free, she spent two years in almost total solitude, creating a series of autobiographical art—images, words, even musical scores—that together tell her life story. A pregnant Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 26, but not before she entrusted her life's work to a friend, who kept it safe until peacetime. The result, an extraordinary novel avant la lettre, was eventually published as Life? or Theatre? (and now reissued by Overlook), a unique, relentlessly complete artistic expression.In Charlotte, David Foenkinos—with passion, life, humor, and intelligent observation—has written his own utterly original tribute to Charlotte Salomon's tragic life and transcendent art. His gorgeous, haunting, and ultimately redemptive novel is the result of a long-cherished desire to honor this young artist. Infused with the emotion of a writer who connects deeply with his subject, and masterfully and sensitively translated by Sam Taylor, Charlotte is a triumph of creative expression, a monument to genius stilled too soon, and an ode to the will to survive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468313444
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	05/31/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	224
File size:	760 KB

About the Author

David Foenkinos is a screenwriter and the author of fourteen novels translated into forty languages, including La Délicatesse, Les Souvenirs, and Je Vais Mieux. In 2011, with his brother, he adapted his book La Délicatesse for the film Delicacy, starring Audrey Tautou and François Damiens. Sam Taylor is a novelist and translator. He is the author of The Amnesiac and The Island at the End of the World and has translated more than a dozen novels from the French, including Laurent Binet's acclaimed HHhH and the bestselling The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.

Editorial Reviews

A sensitive and deeply moving novel.

Paris Match

For fans of Anne Frank, this is indeed a must-read novel . . . Beautifully told.

San Francisco Book Review

Within this crystalline form pulses every shade of emotion, from elation and amusement to longing and sorrow . . . exquisitely empathetic and stunningly tragic.

starred review Booklist

I am deeply, deeply affected by this sad, beautiful, indignant, wrenching, important book . . . Stunning.

Sarah Perry

Foenkinos's paean of Charlotte Salomon's life . . . is a tour de force. Every important detail and much more of this supreme artist's life—'a hierarchy of horror'—is recorded lovingly, passionately, obsessively, and lyrically.

The Jewish Chronicle

A huge best seller in France and now translated into 20 languages, Charlotte breaks the mold of traditional biography by presenting a tragic but moving story in a fictional free verse, each sentence embodying a paragraph in an astute, sometimes humorous and often startling mixture of fact and passion. Charlotte is as much a tribute to genius unfulfilled as the author’s mesmerizing search to connect with the subject’s artistic soul. . . . AlthoughCharlotteis a haunting work, fraught with beautiful and sensitive imagery, it issomething more: a testament to creative artistic expression and, in telling the life of the artist, a tribute to the will to survive.”

Hadassah Magazine

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