Speak / Stop - by Noémi Lefebvre (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An irreverent semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.

--We have read Proust but we're not sure

--Who has really read Proust

--Besides a few Proustians

--We are no Proustians

--Despite not being anti-Proustian...

Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write--a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.

Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is "a madhouse of earthworm sentences" interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre's work.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR SPEAK/STOP

"Lefebvre stages a sparkling dialogue about class, literature, and longing to escape one's life... Readers of experimental literature are in for a treat."--Publishers Weekly

"Lefebvre's approach is intellectual but unpretentious. Her pugnacious prose is consistently delightful...Using cultural criticism and fiction to further the possibilities of both, this is another rapturous work from Lefebvre, allergic to cliche and lazy thinking alike."--Declan Fry, ABC News

PRAISE FOR NOÉMI LEFEBVRE

"Blue Self-Portrait wraps its difficulties in mercurial humor and wordplay, gamely translated from the French by Sophie Lewis. It's inviting enough to read and re-read, and dense enough to provoke different responses each time."--The Wall Street Journal

"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."--Eimear McBride, The Guardian

"Poetics of Work is a divine, social comedy. Lefebvre finds humor in the essential paradox of the contemporary bourgeoisie, and the laughs come deep bellied and serious.--Rain Taxi

"This experimental novel is partly a tongue-in-cheek manifesto for poets and partly a Socratic dialogue with a superego called Papa, who thinks poetry is pointless. An unnamed, genderless narrator wanders around Lyon, smoking joints and questioning society's ideas of usefulness... They read obsessively about the Third Reich and see echoes in the xenophobic tenor of contemporary France, hinting that capitalism and fascism share a disregard for anything considered unproductive."--The New Yorker

About the Author

Noémi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She studied music for over 10 years as a child and later obtained her PhD on the subject of music education and national identity in Germany and France. She became a political scientist at CERAT de Grenoble II Institute. She is the author of three novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success in France: her debut novel L'Autoportrait bleu (2009), L'etat des sentiments a l'age adulte (2012) and L'enfance politique (2015). She is a regular contributor to the respected French investigative website Mediapart and to the bilingual French-German review La mer gelee.