Praise for Blue Self-Portrait
"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
"Blue Self-Portrait is inventive and funny—as well as clever—cycling at breakneck speed through the atrocities of the 20th century."—The Millions
"Blue Self-Portrait may be the antidote to our condition of having too many things on the mind."—KQED
"Blue Self-Portrait glances askance at the mythos of male genius and the mute, compliant notion of womanhood on which it relies."—Public Books
"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel."—Publishers Weekly
"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
