Blue Self-Portrait
Translated by Sophie Lewis.
- £10.99
- Available
- Paperback published on 15/06/2017
- Page count: 162 pages
- ISBN: 9780993009327
Quick take
Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2018 and the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French 2019
Synopsis
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.
About the author
Noémi Lefebvre is a French writer. She studied music and politics, eventually becoming a political scientist at the Instituts d'études politiques of Grenoble II.
This book can be found in:
More books published by Les Fugitives
Contemporary literary fiction & non-fiction translated from the French. Modern classics and English originals.
More books by Noémi Lefebvre
More books written or translated by Sophie Lewis
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