Books by Noemi Lefebvre

In this new novel by the acclaimed author of Blue Self-Portrait, a poet-narrator existing on a diet of cannabis, bananas and books on oppression under the Third Reich muddles through a national state of emergency. Their ten lessons to today's young poets form a blistering treatise on survival skills for the wilfully idle.

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.