The inner monologue of a woman haunted by German composer Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, further to a complex romantic encounter with an American-German pianist-composer in Berlin. As the irresistible, impossible narrator flies home she unpicks her social failures while the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg's passionate, chilling blue.
A contemporary 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. In Blue Self-Portrait Noemi Lefebvre shows how music continues to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures.
About the Author
Noemi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. Further to 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: 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".
Industry Reviews
'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. 'Were we to note the musical expression with which Blue Self-Portrait is performed, it would be con bravura, or even staccato: unchained, wildly.' -- BOMB -- 'Contemporary gender relations get a thorough going-over in this short, brilliant, variously funny and furious debut novel (...) Like an application of the prose style of Thomas Bernhard to a particular female experience more reminiscent of Bridget Jones: a form of acute social embarrassment and chronic self-deprecation. The strength of Lefebvre's novel is that it holds this private anxiety in balance not just with the highbrow cultural references of a well-educated European elite (Brecht, Mann and Adorno all get nods) but with the trauma of the Continent's recent history.' - Times Literary Supplement '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.' Scott Manley Hadley, The Triumph of Now; 'As the plot unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions Lefebvre's musical prose reflects the multidisciplinary approach of the artist it pays homage to.' Big Issue North; " 'L'autoportrait bleu' calls to mind fine lacework, all fancy stitching, a delicate succession of interconnected loops. Nothing but beautiful work here. In this devilishly virtuosic text, which also evokes contrapuntal music, Noemi Lefebvre writes like a genuine composer. It's rare to find a writer successfully able to lend a musical shape to their text. Lefebvre has taken up the challenge in this astonishing, vertiginous account." (Le Figaro litteraire,10 best debut novels of 2009) "The dense, fine-tuned, ever perfectionist writing in this debut novel reinforce its immediacy, grips the reader to the point of obsession." (L'Humanite) "I think this may be a 'master(?)piece." (Charles Boyle, author and publisher)
