Poetics of Work

Noemi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She holds a PhD. in music education and national identity in Germany and France, and she currently teaches music research methodology at university. Her four novels have been critically acclaimed in France and her UK debut, Blue Self-Portrait (2017), received intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Lefebvre is a regular contributor to Mediapart and the bilingual French-German literary review La mer gelee. Together with sound designer Laurent Grappe, Lefebvre has produced several short videos of mock-Socratic dialogues available on YouTube, including the tantalising 'We Are We', commissioned by the Goethe Institut about Brexit.

‘Poetics of Work by Noemi Lefebvre, translated by Sophie Lewis, is set against the backdrop of terrorist attacks and rising nationalism in France. It takes the form of exploratory reflections on philosophy, poetry, language and work, interspersed with conversations with the narrator’s Socratic “superego” father. The narrator finds relevant insights in Kafka, Kraus and Klemperer, only to slam against the brick wall of her father’s gruff, everyman logic. It’s a neatly-made point: perhaps civilisation, with all its nuance and complexity, is too easily out-muscled by simpler arguments, even wrong ones. The book’s propositions are refreshingly low-tech. We are spared facile arguments about the role of the internet in all this, in favour of considering the deeper roots of societal darkness and its palpability in real life.’ - Ronan Hession, Irish Times; 'A smart, timely, and novel manifesto for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy.' -Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up; '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.' - New Yorker; 'Lefebvre's shiftless narrator searches for the place of poetry in a world gone mad, where the "culture sector is a graveyard for the soul's repose." ... an interior monologue filled with sharp observations, hysterical asides, and a sincere search for personal truth. Lefebvre succeeds in mapping out an unquiet mind in the midst of crisis.' - Publishers Weekly; 'Noemi Lefebvre refines a form of vital poetic resistance that ultimately liberates a strange and subversive political animal, half orang and half utan. At once lyrical and feverish, Poetics of Work will do you a power of good.' -Le Monde des livres; 'Lefebvre writes like a hiker who enjoys nothing more than staying where they are, following dead ends or winding, risky paths.' - Les Inrockuptibles; 'Lefebvre stands up to the language of capitalism. She invents her own to elude the law of market forces, which exists in the name of the father. In doing so, she insinuates herself between the lines of the dominant discourse, swimming against the tide of prevailing neoliberalism and its categorical imperatives.' - L'Humanite