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Overview
Decades before the rise of "flash fiction," Félix Fénéon mastered the art of flash nonfiction in the 1,220 short items he wrote for a Paris newspaper in 1906. Collected and published in book form after his death, Fénéon's miniature masterpieces of irony and suspense are a tour de force of Pointillist prose.From adultery, murder, revenge, and traffic accidents to tax collection, labor unrest, suicides, and the occasional well-deserved celebration, daily life in France a century ago was as unexpectedly comic and tragic as anywhere else. But only a cultural figure as central yet self-effacing as Fénéon--quiet dandy and secret anarchist, champion of Seurat and first publisher of Lautréamont, translator of Poe and Jane Austen--could have transformed newspaper hackwork into a modernist mosaic that captures the particular details of a place and an age with such exquisite timing and humor. Novels in Three Lines not only anticipates literary "ready-mades" like Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Andy Warhol's a: a novel; it is a unique artifact from the golden age of the newspaper and a window into France in 1906 on the cusp of modernity.
Synopsis
Decades before the rise of "flash fiction," Félix Fénéon mastered the art of flash nonfiction in the 1,220 short items he wrote for a Paris newspaper in 1906. Collected and published in book form after his death, Fénéon's miniature masterpieces of irony and suspense are a tour de force of Pointillist prose.
From adultery, murder, revenge, and traffic accidents to tax collection, labor unrest, suicides, and the occasional well-deserved celebration, daily life in France a century ago was as unexpectedly comic and tragic as anywhere else. But only a cultural figure as central yet self-effacing as Fénéon--quiet dandy and secret anarchist, champion of Seurat and first publisher of Lautréamont, translator of Poe and Jane Austen--could have transformed newspaper hackwork into a modernist mosaic that captures the particular details of a place and an age with such exquisite timing and humor. Novels in Three Lines not only anticipates literary "ready-mades" like Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Andy Warhol's a: a novel; it is a unique artifact from the golden age of the newspaper and a window into France in 1906 on the cusp of modernity.
The New York Times - Marilyn Johnson
Scraps of news on throwaway newsprint, written by an obscure French figure from the previous century—you'd think you could safely consign these to the literary trash heap. But what if they happen to be marvelous, mocking scraps, written with style and concision?…In Novels in Three Lines, Luc Sante has translated more than a thousand of these miniature dispatches, which run in French newspapers grouped under the rubric faits divers…Layered, ironic, amused, Feneon's voice is unmistakable…The construction, the comic timing, the sly understatement that demands instant rereading—all come together in lines succinct enough for a text message.
Editorials
Marilyn Johnson
Scraps of news on throwaway newsprint, written by an obscure French figure from the previous century—you'd think you could safely consign these to the literary trash heap. But what if they happen to be marvelous, mocking scraps, written with style and concision?…In Novels in Three Lines, Luc Sante has translated more than a thousand of these miniature dispatches, which run in French newspapers grouped under the rubric faits divers…Layered, ironic, amused, Feneon's voice is unmistakable…The construction, the comic timing, the sly understatement that demands instant rereading—all come together in lines succinct enough for a text message.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Prolific writer and cultural critic Sante (Low Life) has translated half a year's worth of concise news blurbs written in 1906 for a Paris newspaper by Fénéon, writer, anarchist and promoter of artists like Seurat and Bonnard. These "nouvelles" (literally "novellas" or "news") attest to the ongoing despair of the human condition, giving readers a relentless compendium of murder, suicide, accidental death (beware of train tracks), infanticide, beatings, stabbings, depression and, in a particularly French twist, endless mention of strikes and scabs. According to Sante, Fénéon took an established form and made it his own through the precision and style of his writing; yet it's hard to define that style, because it seems so variable, often straightforward, at times cheekily irreverent, sometimes syntactically impossible to understand, although it's hard to know how much of that is the translation and how much the writer's native prose. That the news is still filled with stories like those related here attests to the constancy of human nature, in both private and public undertakings, as when Fénéon notes: "The fever, of military origin, that is raging in Rouillac, Charente, is getting worse and spreading. Preventative measures have been taken." Illus. (Aug. 21)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Murders, traffic accidents, suicides, political scandals, labor strikes: these are topics found in any newspaper today. Yet this book's faits-divers, or "sundry events," were crafted by Fénéon over a century ago. Translated by Santé (The Factory of Facts), this curious work is a collection of news items Fénéon wrote in 1906 for Le Matin, a Parisian daily newspaper. These three-line items have no equivalent in U.S. newspapers. More than brief reports or police blotter notes, they are succinct, minimalist accounts of the events of the day, covering almost anything from the mundane (an announcement for a civic association banquet) to the horrific (a dog who ate his dead master's head). Capturing the moment, and thus ephemeral in nature, these items are more like photographs or journalistic haikus or an outline for a novel. (Santé prefers to translate nouvelleshere as "novels" rather than as "news.") Fénéon, who also edited literary journals and was involved in the post-impressionist art scene, turned these faits-diversinto an art form, reflecting the modernist, bare-bones aesthetic of such contemporaries as Seurat, Mallarmé, and Toulouse-Lautrec. For academic libraries and other libraries collecting in the relevant genres.
—Donna Marie Smith