Late one night in December, I was numbly scrolling Twitter when an image of a dark blue, cloth-bound book made me stop, stunned. It seemed my first novel had made its way into the world without me.
A second look revealed the novel wasn’t written by me, but by Noémi Lefebvre. Lowercase “f” and a different first name. Had I been born in France, I would not see our names as remarkable — “Lefebvre” derives from the Latin for “smith” — but where I live in Virginia the surname is a constant curiosity: a librarian asked, shyly, if I was related to the chef she’d read about in Bon Appétit?; the director of a graduate program that I did not attend left his acceptance voicemail in French. I do speak French, maintained by a stint on a dairy farm in the Hautes-Pyrénées, but I speak it badly — unless you want to talk about goat-, sheep-, or cow-milk cheese — so I was glad to learn Transit Books would publish Sophie Lewis’s translation of Blue Self-Portrait in early 2018.
I needed to read the novel, out of curiosity, I told myself, though I knew the feeling was more appropriately called vanity, if vanity can extend to a person you see as your proxy in the world, a person who doesn’t know you exist, a person whose pragmatism you’ve begun to envy. “I didn’t even invent the situations or the characters,” Lefebvre said, in an interview with Publishers Weekly, a line I have said, as a procrastination method of waffling between calling my book fiction or nonfiction or nonfiction-novel or not-nonfiction or autobiographical novel or memoir like Ondaatje’s that blooms into the bright bone of a dream. “It’s a novel without any fiction!” she said, more simply, and I said, okay, okay, I am listening, other N. Lefebvre, I will stop worrying so much. I wanted to see if what was inside her nonfiction-novel-as-self-portrait was anything like me. D’une Lefebvre à l’autre.
I wrote to Transit Books for a copy.
The next morning I woke, white sheets snaking around my legs. I let my hand drop then palm around the nightstand until it landed on my cellphone to open the Gmail app and check that, yes, I had sent not dreamt that message. I sat up, stomach wrenched as the anxieties set in: how embarrassing; how impetuous; who do I think I am? I was, as always, overthinking a tepid connection. Worse: I’d acted on it. Noémi Lefebvre is a novelist and political scientist who holds a PhD on music education and national identity in France and Germany. I haven’t finished writing my first book. My piano is in storage in Florida. I won’t be back for another degree.
But then, the publisher replied. Sent a copy, hand-written thank you note tucked inside.
* * * * *
When I began reading Blue Self-Portrait, I was startled to realize these exact imposter-syndrome feelings constitute the book: worried woman-as-intellectual-outsider; obsessive, anxious woman re-writing previous social encounters; woman apologizing, over and again, for her opinions on art, for her knowledge of music, for her way of speaking, in general. Lefebvre takes this uncomfortably familiar sentiment — reminiscent of Chris Kraus, echoed in Lorde’s “Liability” — and pushes it to the extreme:
I had to leave the pianist sure that I’d put him off seeing me ever again, even by accident, instilled a lifelong revulsion in him for the kind of girl I am, the kind who talk too much and whose flaws we know well, who go on exasperating those around them down the generations, who ruin the lives of their husbands children and lovers, never content with that understanding silence required for happiness.
This is, by the way, the second-half of a sentence, right before the narrator’s refrain: “Ich habe zu viel gesprochen.” I have said too much.
A slim, 130-page volume, Blue Self-Portrait takes place entirely in the air, on a flight from Berlin to Paris, and therefore, the action is set in the meandering mind. The narrator tells her memories with such churning, textured sentences that the reader feels out of time, entirely, propelled forward, instead, by the glee of keen observation.
The writer Jane Alison, while researching neuroscience for her upcoming book on narrative structure, explained cognitive mapping to me: “egocentric” spatial awareness—understanding what you see around you, in relation to the self — versus “allo-centric” knowledge — the position of objects and buildings in relation to other objects and buildings, viewed from above. Though the novel is insular, it never feels egotistical or overly self-involved, and that is, in part, because Noémi Lefebvre often switches from the ego-centric stance of a classic first-person point of view to an aerial, allo-centric viewpoint: the narrator sails above Berlin, and attempts to watch herself and her love-interest moving through space, able to be studied, objectively, and therefore understood.
The narrator sits next to her sister and recounts her recent dates with a German-American composer and pianist: at the Café Einstein, the SONY center, and the gallery that holds Arnold Schoenberg’s “Blue Self-Portrait,” an image that renders the pianist silent, in reverence, before composing an ekphrastic monody — which is also an apt way to describe the novel — while the narrator holds her tongue, allows herself to think about Schoenberg as a painter versus a musician, about the many composers who came before him, about her mother-in-law who finds her disturbing, who accuses her of never being serious, “by dint of my unconcern I concerned others more and more” before finally landing on Schoenberg’s quote from March 31, 1931 on Radio Berlin, and, perhaps Noémi Lefebvre’s own artist statement: “The conviction that I have written nothing I should be ashamed of forms the foundation of my moral existence.” The narrator remains ashamed of everything. What Lefebvre is writing — if we can extrapolate that she’s made nothing up and therefore believes, at least in part, what the narrator thinks — makes her cringe, but admitting it all, in full-force, is a potent way of owning her own behavior; not shedding shame, but spitting it out to examine it, and laughing at it, too, at the recurring image of her endlessly chatty self as a loud cow “bellowing, moo-calling[1], I mean, the nocturnal call of the cow.”
[Left: Noémi Lefebvre]
The narrator presents an “unquenchable stream of observations and ingenious associations.” Time dilates. The mind wanders, turns in on itself, wanders again: back to self-education, Schoenberg, shame. Each time the narrator recalls something embarrassing, she curls up in her airplane seat: “in shame, deep shame, I re-coiled my legs like venomous snakes and hunched my shoulders.” A fetal pose, all-too-familiar to any person who worries. Despite her embarrassment and self-deprecation, her fierce intelligent is clear, and gleeful, for the reader, to follow. She laments her poor education and then moves seamlessly through music history and the history of the holocaust — “atonality as an abstraction, abstraction as an isolation, isolation as a resistance to the world” — references Flaubert and Beckett alongside Beethoven, Wagner, and Schoenberg, leafs through the collection of letters between Thomas Mann and Adorno that lays, splayed open, on her lap. Despite all of her knowledge, she’s still made to feel both too much and never enough. Ich habe zu viel gesprochen.
As I read, I kept wondering what, exactly, is too muchwhen it comes to a writing style. I find Jamaica Kincaid’s repetition mesmerizing but a dear friend chucked Mr. Potter across the room. I’m not one for page-long sentences—Bernhard makes my eyes bleed, and no, I never finished Correction — but I was game for Lefebvre’s. Humor helps, as does rhythm and momentum; she at times avoids commas to speed the eye along: “I was floating too thinking nothing but fetal thoughts but that’s pure invention.” Most importantly, I find it a matter of scope. These are long, digressive sentences, but the book itself is only 130-pages long. Lefebvre seems aware of her reader’s limit. She tests it — one formidable sentence stretches across forty-two lines, three pages — but she reins it in, too. She’s a maximalist, in brief.
* * * * *
My first full-time job out of college, after endless days spent interning up and down Manhattan while nannying and scarfing sandwiches on the subway, was as the music editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, ushering the college edition of The Oxford History of Western Music into production. Talk about maximalism: Richard Taruskin had been contracted in the nineties to write the history of all western music and, rather than a book, he delivered six volumes. OUP published it, as is. Christopher Gibbs was then hired by the higher education department to condense the work, alongside Taruskin, into a one-volume 1,212-page college textbook.
I got the job, in part, because I played classical piano as a teenager, traveling from my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts to other similarly-enviable cities like Pittsburg! and Cleveland! for competitions. The editor needed an assistant who could read music and confirm that the correct sample measures were included, in-text. Three months into my job, the editor retired. I was given access to her email so I could complete her tasks and — as I write this, my legs coil up, snaking into a Lefebvre shame pretzel — I promptly searched my name in her inbox. I learned she’d hired me because she couldn’t handle another “wilting wallflower” of an assistant so the image of confident flower, a sunflower with its thick hairy stem, lodged in my mind, and although I spent the rest of the year overworked, underpaid, and often intimidated, I began speaking as if I were the executive editor, making decisions swiftly and confidently, imposter syndrome be damned. One small issue: aside from performing it, I didn’t know the first thing about the classical music.
The way I learned piano was this: three songs per year, one classical, one pop, and one duet, sharing the bench with my high school best friend. I would try and then learn and then practice and then practice and then practice and then practice and then memorize these songs, playing them over and again for hours a day until they were muscle memory, showing up at my piano teacher’s studio once a week to test them, at times with pennies on the backs of my hands, at times with sharpened pencils under my wrists, often hearing in her husky, flippant voice, the truth: you’ll never be perfect enough. I would then perform these songs for judges, regionals then nationals, wiping my too-small hands—really you can’t reach one note past an octave? — on a washcloth before I began. I adored piano, adored the pursuit of a perfect-able performance, but I never learned the theory or history behind the music.
One afternoon at the university press, I was reviewing page proofs for a chapter on opera and, honestly, learning a lot, when another assistant (male, Harvard-educated, and, to my frustration, better paid than the rest of us, female, non-Ivy assistants) and the publisher stood near my cube. I initiated small talk then balked when they began discussing their favorite Wagner operas, feeling immediately small and self-conscious, wishing I could pull a lid over my tuna-can cubicle, and most of all, relieved I was managing to stay silent, as I certainly would’ve pronounced Wagner as in tail-wagging. Or, as the other Lefebvre would write: “I was suffering a fundamental lack of serenity despite sending out serene signals; I was practically basking in fulfillment if you went solely on appearances.”
But when I pull The Oxford History of Western Music off my shelf and onto my lap now, it’s not shame I feel, but amusement — its overwhelming, cement heft contains, there, in print, my little name! — and then pride, remembering that the beautiful sheet music end-pages were my idea, and then impressed when I read a chapter on Schoenberg and realize just how brilliant a novel Noémi Lefebvre has penned, with its intricate web of references.
Richard Taruskin, writing about Schoenberg’s decadence said, “Maximalism, in the form of concentrated effect, can coexist perfectly well with brevity — indeed … there was eventually a race toward the limits of compression, just as there had previously been one toward the limits of extension. Maximalism is above all a highly competitive phenomenon …” Lefebvre’s style is a nod to Schoenberg — not only in its self-portraiture and narrative dissonance but in its brief maximalism, managing to be both dense and airy, intellectual and amusing, filled with contradictions, her long, winding sentences delivered in a compressed package.
The narrator’s fears about her bad education, her non-intellectual upbringing fit with Schoenberg, too. Here’s Taruskin, again: “Schoenberg’s whole career was fraught with ironies, contradictions, and ambiguities, beginning with the paradox that one of the outstanding academic music theorists and composition teachers of the twentieth century was himself self-taught. … when it came to composing in “classical” forms, he had to look them up in an encyclopedia.”
Yet it’s not Schoenberg to whom the narrator turns, for comfort, for closure, as the plane descends into Paris, it’s not Brahms, or Beethoven, or Mann, it’s not any man. It’s her sister, who has sat by her side the whole time, and finally says, enough: “You think you’re doing the minimum when actually you’re always doing the maximum…and your maximum is not everyone else’s maximum but an exceptionally lofty maximum…your maximum is fearful to behold.”
I could continue writing about this book, its impressive brief heft, both self-portrait and prismatic reference, long into the night, but rather I think I’ll go call my sister, whose own maximum is fearful to behold, because, after all I have already said too much and it’s time, instead, to listen.