Blue Self-Portrait

January 29, 2018
Lefebvre’s furiously cerebral first novel to be translated into English takes place entirely during a 90-minute flight from Berlin to Paris. But the setting’s static and narrow confines belie the inner expansiveness of its unnamed narrator, whose thoughts propel the narrative. She obsessively returns to an encounter with a pianist-composer she met in Germany, gradually uncovering more detail as she loops through her memories: she met the pianist-composer in a café; he had recently seen an exhibition called “Music and the Third Reich”; they visited a cinema in the Sony Center to see a spy flick, as well as Bertolt Brecht’s house. The narrator also recalls her mother-in-law’s diagnosing her as “not-caring,” which, though it may be true in her relationships, isn’t true in her inner monologue. Lefebvre’s prose moves fluidly, recalling the works of Clarice Lispector and Claire-Louise Bennett. Full of great lines (“A bastard of a dad will make scum of his son”; “I was floating too thinking nothing but fetal thoughts but that’s pure invention, I’ve no fetal memories and that’s fine by me”), this is a probing, wild, and fascinating novel.

March 1, 2018
The stream of consciousness of an unnamed, utterly obsessive woman on an airplane.The narrator of Lefebvre's first novel to appear in English has no name, no stated occupation. When this slim book begins, her plane is taking off from Berlin; it ends as she lands in Paris, her home. In between is a kind of cyclone of her thoughts, which circle obsessively around certain themes, certain images, without ever reaching any kind of consistency, let alone resolution. At the center of her thoughts is a man she refers to as "the pianist" or "the composer," whom she saw in Berlin when, to her great regret and self-loathing, she talked too much. Other points of obsession include: the narrator's education; her habit of not caring, a cardinal characteristic; the idea of collective happiness; the letters of Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno; and the self-portrait by Arnold Schoenberg, in which the composer appears in blue, with upturned nostrils and only one ear, which gives the book its title. It's difficult to say how all of this ties together or whether, indeed, it does. It's difficult to say what has actually happened and what the narrator has only imagined happening. It's easy, too easy, to refer to all this as stream of consciousness, though there doesn't seem to be a better phrase. There is pleasure to be found in the elegance and sophistication of the narrator's thoughts. There is humor as well as pathos in her self-doubt. But her endless obsessing becomes tiresome in the same way it does in any friend, acquaintance, or person you've been seated beside on an airplane. You long for a breath of air, for some calm. Lefebvre fits a lot into her slim little novel--but she never achieves calm.Witty, smart, and occasionally fascinating, Lefebvre's novel becomes tiresome by the end.

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April 1, 2018
Lefebvre's first novel (published in its original French in 2009) borrows its title from Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg's painted self-portrait, and is more like music than it is like most books. With sentences longer than this review and a tone that shifts from funny to serious on a sixteenth note, and incorporating not only musicality but multiple languages, it is a feat of translation as well. Over the course of a 90-minute flight from Berlin to Paris, a French woman prepares herself for home while recalling a liaison with a German American pianist she leaves behind. Though she has taken to heart her former mother-in-law's criticism that she suffers from a fundamental not-caring, she appears to care about quite a lot of things, many of them cause for further self-admonishment. For saying things without first counting to 10, for instance. Refrains, themes, and motifs are everywhere as she summons thoughts of the pianist and the portrait, composers and compositions, and Berlin's history-entrenched places that also hold personal significance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)