A French woman haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer who is obsessed with Arnold Schoenbergs portrait, flies home with her lively sister and a volume of Adornos 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 Schoenbergs passionate, chilling blue. A novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlins 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.
