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WORK TITLE: Blue Self-Portrait
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1964
WEBSITE:
CITY: Lyon
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: French
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1964, in Caen, France.
EDUCATION:Holds a Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and political scientist. CERAT de Grenoble II Institute, currently an instructor in research methodology for graduate students in music.
WRITINGS
Also author of the novels (in French), L’etat des sentiment a l’age adulte, 2012, and L’enfance politique, 2015. Contributor to websites and periodicals, including Mediapart and La mer gelee.
SIDELIGHTS
French writer and novelist Noemi Lefebvre was born in Caen, France, in 1964. In her youth, she studied music, and as an adult earned a Ph.D. in music education and national identity in Germany and France, , noted a writer on the website of the publisher Les Fugitives. She has worked as a political science at CERAT de Grenoble II Institute. Following that, Lefebvre became an instructor in research methodology for graduate students studying music.
Blue Self-Portrait is Lefebvre’s first novel to be translated into English, and it is “more like music than it is like most books,” observed Booklist writer Annie Bostrom. The text of the novel consists of the “stream of consciousness of an unnamed, utterly obsessive woman on an airplane,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer, and she is never given a name, occupation, or similar identifying characteristics. Within her internal monologue, however, readers come to learn much about the narrator and her personality.
The entire novel takes place during a ninety-minute flight from Berlin to Paris, but the “setting’s static and narrow confines belie the inner expansiveness” of the narrator, commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. Throughout the entire novel, “we are at the mercy of the highly entertaining cycles and reflections of our unnamed heroine’s linguistic neuroses,” remarked Eimear McBride in a London Guardian review.
The narrator demonstrates an obsessiveness about multiple things, despite having been told by her former mother-in-law that she doesn’t care. She considers her relationship with a man she knew in Berlin whom she refers to as “the pianist” or “the composer,” a musician she was captivated by and with whom she had a brief encounter, seeing a spy movie and visiting Bertolt Brecht’s house. She muses on the letters written between German writer Thomas Mann and philosopher/composer Theodor W. Adorno. She thinks about the places in Berlin that hold personal significance for her while also being historically important. She also obsesses on a self-portrait by artist Arnold Schoenberg, painted in blue, which is the “blue self-portrait” referred to in the book’s title.
“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,” commented Scott Manley Hadley, writing on the website Triumph of the Now. The Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked: “this is a probing, wild, and fascinating novel,” while the Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel “Witty, smart, and occasionally fascinating.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of Blue Self-Portrait, p. 50.
Guardian (London, England), June 29, 2017, Eimear McBride, “Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebvre Review—Sex, Art, and Neurosis.”
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Blue Self-Portrait.
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of Blue Self-Portrait, p. 166.
ONLINE
Les Fugitives website, http://www.lesfugitives.com/ (June 12, 2018), biography of Noemi Lefebvre.
Triumph of the Now, https://www.triumphofthenow.com/ (June 2, 2017), Scott Manley Hadley, review of Blue Self-Portrait.
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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Noémi Lefebvre
Born in 1964 in Caen, Noémi Lefebvre lives in Lyon and is the author of four novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success: L’autoportrait bleu (2009), L’état des sentiment à l’âge adulte (2012), L'enfance politique (2015) and Poétique de l'emploi (2018). She is a regular contributor to the French investigative website Mediapart and the bilingual French-German review La mer gelée. Further to a 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 and now teaches research methodology for music post-graduates.
Blue Self-Portrait
Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Blue Self-Portrait. By Noemi Lefebvre. Tr. by Sophie Lewis. Apr. 2018. 152p. Transit, paper, $15.95 (9781945492105).
Lefebvre's first novel (published in its original French in 2009) borrows its title from Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg's painted self-portrait, and is more like music than it is like most books. With sentences longer than this review and a tone that shifts from funny to serious on a sixteenth note, and incorporating not only musicality but multiple languages, it is a feat of translation as well. Over the course of a 90-minute flight from Berlin to Paris, a French woman prepares herself for home while recalling a liaison with a German American pianist she leaves behind. Though she has taken to heart her former mother-in-law's criticism that she suffers from a "fundamental not-caring," she appears to care about quite a lot of things, many of them cause for further self-admonishment. For saying things without first counting to 10, for instance. Refrains, themes, and motifs are everywhere as she summons thoughts of the pianist and the portrait, composers and compositions, and Berlin's history-entrenched places that also hold personal significance.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Blue Self-Portrait." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956855/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4553d9b2. Accessed 10 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956855
Lefebvre, Noemi: BLUE SELF-PORTRAIT
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lefebvre, Noemi BLUE SELF-PORTRAIT Transit Books (Adult Fiction) $15.95 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-945492-10-5
The stream of consciousness of an unnamed, utterly obsessive woman on an airplane.
The narrator of Lefebvre's first novel to appear in English has no name, no stated occupation. When this slim book begins, her plane is taking off from Berlin; it ends as she lands in Paris, her home. In between is a kind of cyclone of her thoughts, which circle obsessively around certain themes, certain images, without ever reaching any kind of consistency, let alone resolution. At the center of her thoughts is a man she refers to as "the pianist" or "the composer," whom she saw in Berlin when, to her great regret and self-loathing, she talked too much. Other points of obsession include: the narrator's education; her habit of not caring, a cardinal characteristic; the idea of collective happiness; the letters of Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno; and the self-portrait by Arnold Schoenberg, in which the composer appears in blue, with upturned nostrils and only one ear, which gives the book its title. It's difficult to say how all of this ties together or whether, indeed, it does. It's difficult to say what has actually happened and what the narrator has only imagined happening. It's easy, too easy, to refer to all this as stream of consciousness, though there doesn't seem to be a better phrase. There is pleasure to be found in the elegance and sophistication of the narrator's thoughts. There is humor as well as pathos in her self-doubt. But her endless obsessing becomes tiresome in the same way it does in any friend, acquaintance, or person you've been seated beside on an airplane. You long for a breath of air, for some calm. Lefebvre fits a lot into her slim little novel--but she never achieves calm.
Witty, smart, and occasionally fascinating, Lefebvre's novel becomes tiresome by the end.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lefebvre, Noemi: BLUE SELF-PORTRAIT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959908/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ec13c887. Accessed 10 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959908
Blue Self-Portrait
Publishers Weekly. 265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p166.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Blue Self-Portrait
Noemi Lefebvre, trans, from the French by Sophie Lewis. Transit (Consortium, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-945492-10-5
Lefebvre's furiously cerebral first novel to be translated into English takes place entirely during a 90-minute flight from Berlin to Paris. But the setting's static and narrow confines belie the inner expansiveness of its unnamed narrator, whose thoughts propel the narrative. She obsessively returns to an encounter with a pianist-composer she met in Germany, gradually uncovering more detail as she loops through her memories: she met the pianist-composer in a cafe; he had recently seen an exhibition called "Music and the Third Reich"; they visited a cinema in the Sony Center to see a spy flick, as well as Bertolt Brecht's house. The narrator also recalls her mother-in-law's diagnosing her as "not-caring," which, though it may be true in her relationships, isn't true in her inner monologue. Lefebvre's prose moves fluidly, recalling the works of Clarice Lispector and Claire-Louise Bennett. Full of great lines ("A bastard of a dad will make scum of his son"; "I was floating too thinking nothing but fetal thoughts but that's pure invention, I've no fetal memories and that's fine by me"), this is a probing, wild, and fascinating novel. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blue Self-Portrait." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 166. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116508/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e199b8e4. Accessed 10 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116508
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre review – sex, art and neurosis
Schoenberg’s music, Thomas Mann’s writing and the aftermath of Nazism overlap in an ingenious novel brimming with ideas
Eimear McBride
Thu 29 Jun 2017 12.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.45 GMT
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Memories of leaving Berlin: the Brandenburg Gate. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
T
he first of Noémi Lefebvre’s three critically acclaimed novels to appear in translation comes courtesy of the relatively new but already impressive indie press Les Fugitives. Its commitment to making the work of hitherto untranslated French female authors available in English is a heartening crusade in these dark times. So far it has given us Nathalie Léger’s fascinating, genre-bending Suite for Barbara Loden and Ananda Devi’s excellent Eve Out of Her Ruins. Blue Self-Portrait is the third book in its publications list.
“You’ll have to change that way you talk, my girl, I told myself in German, in French, then in German again, then in French, as if I was my own mother,” says the protagonist to herself at the outset. Her plane has just taken off from Berlin and, for the 90 minutes of its flight to Paris, we are at the mercy of the highly entertaining cycles and reflections of our unnamed heroine’s linguistic neuroses. Accompanied by her sister, whose interjections and observations punctuate her digressions, she’s also cringe-suffering over the memory of a man she left behind. He’s an American-German composer, whose own thoughts on their brief interlude together – and other subjects – also intrude over the course of the novel.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. Its author’s background in music (a PhD in the subject) and politics (informed by her German and French national identity) is always manifest.
This is a dense, intense examination of the disruptive effect that ideas about art and politics have on one another. Lefebvre is particularly interesting on the effect of music on the historical memory, and vice versa. The protagonist and the composer share an obsession with musician and painter Arnold Schoenberg: the former with his Blue Self-Portrait, the latter with the impossibility of his music, and music generally in the aftermath of nazism and the obliterating horror of the Holocaust. A quote from Schoenberg’s 1931 speech on Berlin radio – “The conviction that I have written nothing I should be ashamed of forms the foundation of my moral existence” – is singled out for repeated reflection and becomes a touchstone.
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Indeed, the concept of shame, from the personal to the political, is a recurrent theme. This is where much of the fun in the book surfaces, with the main character seemingly incapable of extricating herself from a furnace of scorching social embarrassment. She professes that her essential state of “not-caring”, as diagnosed during a particularly troublesome tennis match with her former mother-in-law, is at the root of her problems. “The not-caring prevents me from living normally, speaking normally, eating normally, sleeping normally … from measuring the seriousness of my own body, the substance of my own body, my body’s malleability, my body’s presence, it was as if I didn’t have a body I thought as I ran to and fro across the court, winding myself and missing the ball with an impressive frequency that visibly irritated my opponent.” Yet the consistency with which she relives agonising moments of mortification – “I recalled driving the pianist-composer-driver right round the bend by making him go up and down Neue Kanstrasse three times because I could no longer find the entrance to my Polish hostel, and my shameometer measured a new record” – are more reflective of a person who cares too much. According to Lefebvre, life and art are at their sharpest, and most truthful, when wrestling in the gaps between contradictions.
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The “not-caring” quote is also illustrative of the linguistic style that has been fiendishly well reproduced here by translator Sophie Lewis. While this reads initially as straightforward stream of consciousness, it soon emerges that Lefebvre is applying Schoenberg’s compositional innovation of the “developing variation” to language. This is the theory that a central idea contains within it all that is required for the creation of variations on it. By using it in this way, the author creates a cunning maze in which her protagonist’s stream of logical, linear thought paradoxically begins to go round in circles.
Inevitably, a novel exploring modernist compositional techniques alongside an appraisal of the poisonous bequest of the Third Reich faces comparison to Thomas Mann’s great symphonic novel Doctor Faustus. Further, while in exile in LA during the second world war, Mann incurred Schoenberg’s wrath by putting the composer’s revolutionary musical theories into the mouth of his antihero, Leverkühn, uncredited. As if in anticipation, Lefebvre’s antiheroine has the correspondence between Mann and Theodor Adorno – another California exile and Mann’s adviser on all matters 12-tonal during Doctor Faustus’s creation – open on her lap throughout. This is more than just another ingenious overlap in a novel already full of them. Lefebvre is placing herself within the conversation and, happily, Blue Self-Portrait never buckles beneath the weight.
• Blue Self-Portrait is published by Les Fugitives. To order a copy for £9.34 (RRP £10.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
• Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians is published by Faber.
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre
Some newly-translated cracking French fiction
by scottmanleyhadley
June 2, 2017
Comment 1
Les Fugitives is an independent publishing house with a very precise remit. It publishes only short books that have been written by award-winning, female, francophone writers who have previously not been translated into English. If that sounds incredibly niche, it isn’t1. Think of how many books are published, think of how many literary awards are given, think of how many writers are women and think of how many places in the world people speak French. With these rules, they obviously have a limited pool of books to choose from, but still a large one. And though I haven’t read the previous two books they’ve put out, if Blue Self-Portrait is anything to go by, then Les Fugitives is clearly doing the English world of letters a great service, because this is a belter.
Blue Self-Portrait is written by Noémi Lefebvre and translated by Sophie Lewis, and was originally published (in French, obvs) in 2009. It is a short stream-of-consciousness novel from the perspective of a woman as she flies from Berlin to Paris, reflecting on a romantic interaction she had with a German-American pianist/composer. It’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s fiercely intelligent and it often teeters on the edge of being deeply moving. In short, it’s a very good book.
The eponymous image
The novel’s protagonist and her sister sit side by side on an aeroplane, looking out of the window and looking into the past. There is a lot in this book about classical music (including contemporary classical music), which is not something I know very much about, so was worried I might find the text a little alienating. However, the way the music is written about is very much from a responsive position, the way music affects feelings, affects moments, affects mood, and Lefebvre engages with this almost indirectly by having her protagonist recount in great detail the (male) pianist’s response to a painting (guess the colour and the subject from this novel’s title) and his desire to make music about it. The painting – which you can see above – is by the composer Arnold Schoenberg, and as the pianist struggles to formulate an artistic response to this piece of visual art and understand his own place within the canon of musical creativity, the protagonist evokes at length the problematic responses she regularly has to art, to music, to existence, which seems to constitute a simultaneous indifference and over-engagement. As a human, she obsesses over the accusation of her ex-husband’s mother that she is “uncaring” (also translated as “insouciant”, “indifferent”, “not-caring” (there’s a note about it at the end)), which in itself exposes the hypocrisy of the statement. She cares too much to appear caring, she cares about caring, the book is a near-breathless exercise in awkwardness, anxiety, worry, it’s an exciting evocation of a kind of mind I recognise, one where an individual obsesses over the way she is sat and how other people will judge that decision, one where weird ideas recur in a way that other people find confusing, one that considers, remembers, recalls, both her own memories and other people’s.
We slip into the memories and experiences of the pianist almost by accident, as the narrator recounts stories he has told her; we are almost dragged into them as if they’re first-hand. Her empathy is important, her emotional intelligence is astute, her perceived notion of not-caring is wrong because she is overwhelmed by caring, by thought, by memory. Like Proust (whose name crops up a lot) she is sucked into memory after memory, but unlike Proust this is a short work, and one where the character doing the memorialising is moving, rather than static. The protagonist flies, and the view from the window changes – which in itself provokes the resurgence of memories – and she comments on her experiences in the plane with her sister (who threatens to begin playing the violin mid-air at one point) and with the book[s] she is reading, letters between Thomas Mann (also a literary writer with a keen interest in music) and Theodor W Adorno, a critical theorist.
This is a text filled with ideas, with cultural and artistic references, and also to the recurring motif of a cow grieving for the loss of its calf, removed at birth. It is a novel about displacement, about loneliness, about disconnection and the fear of disconnection, about family and love, about art and regret; in a short work it is a deeply exploratory tone, and its content in combination with its long sentences and huge paragraphs make for a demanding read, but one that is very rewarding. 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.
Read something literary, something deep. Go go go.
Blue-Self Portrait is published by Les Fugitives. Clickaclickaddyclick for more information.