Noémi Lefebvre

Translated by Sophie Lewis

First published 1 June 2017

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2018 and the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French 2019

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.

Read an excerpt on Grantaorwatch a reading by Leah Walker for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2018
See reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and more

By the same author: Poetics of Work(2021)

160 pages
paperback 180 x 120 mm
isbn 978-0-9930093-2-7

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