Blue Self-Portrait by Nomi Lefebvre review sex, art and neurosis

The first of Noémi Lefebvre’s three critically acclaimed novels to appear in translation comes courtesy of the relatively new but already impressive indie press Les Fugitives. Its commitment to making the work of hitherto untranslated French female authors available in English is a heartening crusade in these dark times. So far it has given us Nathalie Léger’s fascinating, genre-bending Suite for Barbara Loden and Ananda Devi’s excellent Eve Out of Her Ruins. Blue Self-Portrait is the third book in its publications list.

“You’ll have to change that way you talk, my girl, I told myself in German, in French, then in German again, then in French, as if I was my own mother,” says the protagonist to herself at the outset. Her plane has just taken off from Berlin and, for the 90 minutes of its flight to Paris, we are at the mercy of the highly entertaining cycles and reflections of our unnamed heroine’s linguistic neuroses. Accompanied by her sister, whose interjections and observations punctuate her digressions, she’s also cringe-suffering over the memory of a man she left behind. He’s an American-German composer, whose own thoughts on their brief interlude together – and other subjects – also intrude over the course of the novel.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. Its author’s background in music (a PhD in the subject) and politics (informed by her German and French national identity) is always manifest.

This is a dense, intense examination of the disruptive effect that ideas about art and politics have on one another. Lefebvre is particularly interesting on the effect of music on the historical memory, and vice versa. The protagonist and the composer share an obsession with musician and painter Arnold Schoenberg: the former with his Blue Self-Portrait, the latter with the impossibility of his music, and music generally in the aftermath of nazism and the obliterating horror of the Holocaust. A quote from Schoenberg’s 1931 speech on Berlin radio – “The conviction that I have written nothing I should be ashamed of forms the foundation of my moral existence” – is singled out for repeated reflection and becomes a touchstone.

Indeed, the concept of shame, from the personal to the political, is a recurrent theme. This is where much of the fun in the book surfaces, with the main character seemingly incapable of extricating herself from a furnace of scorching social embarrassment. She professes that her essential state of “not-caring”, as diagnosed during a particularly troublesome tennis match with her former mother-in-law, is at the root of her problems. “The not-caring prevents me from living normally, speaking normally, eating normally, sleeping normally … from measuring the seriousness of my own body, the substance of my own body, my body’s malleability, my body’s presence, it was as if I didn’t have a body I thought as I ran to and fro across the court, winding myself and missing the ball with an impressive frequency that visibly irritated my opponent.” Yet the consistency with which she relives agonising moments of mortification – “I recalled driving the pianist-composer-driver right round the bend by making him go up and down Neue Kanstrasse three times because I could no longer find the entrance to my Polish hostel, and my shameometer measured a new record” – are more reflective of a person who cares too much. According to Lefebvre, life and art are at their sharpest, and most truthful, when wrestling in the gaps between contradictions.

The “not-caring” quote is also illustrative of the linguistic style that has been fiendishly well reproduced here by translator Sophie Lewis. While this reads initially as straightforward stream of consciousness, it soon emerges that Lefebvre is applying Schoenberg’s compositional innovation of the “developing variation” to language. This is the theory that a central idea contains within it all that is required for the creation of variations on it. By using it in this way, the author creates a cunning maze in which her protagonist’s stream of logical, linear thought paradoxically begins to go round in circles.

Inevitably, a novel exploring modernist compositional techniques alongside an appraisal of the poisonous bequest of the Third Reich faces comparison to Thomas Mann’s great symphonic novel Doctor Faustus. Further, while in exile in LA during the second world war, Mann incurred Schoenberg’s wrath by putting the composer’s revolutionary musical theories into the mouth of his antihero, Leverkühn, uncredited. As if in anticipation, Lefebvre’s antiheroine has the correspondence between Mann and Theodor Adorno – another California exile and Mann’s adviser on all matters 12-tonal during Doctor Faustus’s creation – open on her lap throughout. This is more than just another ingenious overlap in a novel already full of them. Lefebvre is placing herself within the conversation and, happily, Blue Self-Portrait never buckles beneath the weight.

Blue Self-Portrait is published by Les Fugitives. To order a copy for £9.34 (RRP £10.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians is published by Faber.

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