Noémi Lefebvre

The Publisher Says: As Lyon is consumed by protests, a darkly comic exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write.

A state of emergency is declared in "the good city of Lyon" and protesters and police clash in the streets. At the unemployment office, there are few job opportunities for poets going around. So the poet reads accounts of life under the Third Reich and in Nazi language, smokes cannabis, walks through the streets, and eats bananas, drawn by an overbearing father into a hilarious and often cynical exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write. In this Oulipean experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One of those ever-so-French récits that I like, but often don't love. This one is, to be honest, untranslatable. In French everything has a gender. This story does not gender its narrator, and like all récits this one takes place entirely in its PoV character's head; unless actively thinking about sex, we don't gender our own thoughts. So this genderless tale of a slice of the life of a nameless genderless soul at a crucial moment in recent French history is far more trenchant when ungendered in a highly gendered language...a lot of the impact is lost in neuter-English.

Perfect for the moment when a story is too short, a novel is too long, and one wants to think in the worldview of an aspiring-to-success poet. And is in the mood for sly, leftist humor. And does not care a fig for conventional, plodding storytelling but still craves a story.

A purchase direct from Transit Books supports a literary press, and only sets you back $15.95, a price I call cheap for the fun you could have.… (altro)

One of my greatest unhappinesses is the difficulty of finding books like this written by women (I mean, this is not a great unhappiness in the grand scheme of things, but you know). The family tree is fairly straightforward: Proust and Beckett, through Bernhard, Marias, Moya, and so on. These books are unashamedly intellectual, funny, not formally interesting necessarily, but at least aware that authors have a choice in the style of their compositions.

Here's one for all of you who feel the same way: this is just fucking great, and more than worthy to sit alongside the other living representatives of this tradition. Congratulations to Sophie Lewis on the translation. I hope to see more Lefebvre in English soon.… (altro)

"Blue Self-Portrait" takes its title from a painting by Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) who is best known for his early atonal works such as Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) (1899) and Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and for his later development & formalization of so-called "12-tone music" which did not compose in the conventional classical music key signatures and instead worked with themes of 12-tone rows where each note of the chromatic scale was treated equally. Although the style became somewhat of a dead end for classical music in that it became so esoteric that many composers & audiences eventually sought simpler classical forms or even reduced forms such as minimalism for their listening enjoyment, Schoenberg's innovations and his historical importance cannot be overrated and they are still part of most contemporary composers' journeys to study and adapt & utilize aspects of them.

Lefebvre's portrait in its turn takes Schonberg's painting as a point of reference for a stream-of-consciousness journey which takes place in the mind of an unnamed narrator while on her journey with her sister back from Berlin to Paris where they have been attending concerts and galleries. The narrator has also had a liaison with a German-American pianist-composer who is in the process of composing a work which is also called "Blue Self-Portrait." The narrator's own story mixes both long and short-term flashbacks to the recent Berlin trip and to her earlier life. That itself is another "Blue Self-Portrait."

All of this may sound overly artsy and self-referentially cultural but the overall tone of this is often humorous and self-deprecating. I am often attracted to writing that is built around music and composition so obviously some personal bias goes into my assessment here. The energy and spirit of it was unexpected though and made for even greater enjoyment.

This is my first read of the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize shortlist of 6 books selected prior to the final awarding on March 20, 2018. The R of C Prize is a unique award for independent publishers which is partially crowd-funded. One of the perks includes copies of each of the shortlisted works. See and read more about the Prize at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/republic-of-consciousness-2017-the-prize-fund...… (altro)