Catherine Hélie © Editions Gallimard
Noémi Lefebvre
Noémi Lefebvre was born in 1964 in Caen, and now lives in Lyon, France. She is the author of four novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success: her debut novel Blue Self-Portrait (2009), L’etat des sentiment a l’age adulte (2012), L’enfance politique (2015), and Poetics of Work (2018).
titles by noémi lefebvre
Noémi Lefebvre
Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis.
An irreverent semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.
—We have read Proust but we’re not sure
—Who has really read Proust
—Besides a few Proustians
—We are no Proustians
—Despite not being anti-Proustian...
Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write—a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.
Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is “a madhouse of earthworm sentences” interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre’s work.
Noémi Lefebvre
Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis
On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by German composer Arnold Schoenberg’s self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a German-American pianist-composer. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin’s cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection.
Noémi Lefebvre
Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis
A state of emergency has been declared in France. In Lyon, 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 Oulipian 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.