Novels in Three Lines

Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was born in Turin (his father was a traveling salesman), raised in Burgundy, and came to Paris after placing first in a competitive exam for jobs in the War Office. He was employed as a clerk there for thirteen years, rising to chief clerk, and was considered a model employee. During this time he also edited the work of Rimbaud and Lautréamont, reviewed books and art (he helped to discover Georges Seurat), and was a regular at Mallarmé's Tuesday evening salon. Fénéon was active too in anarchist circles, and in 1894, after the bombing of a restaurant popular among politicians and financiers and the assassination by an Italian anarchist of the French president, he and twenty-nine others were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy—though in the subsequent so-called Trial of the Thirty Fénéon and most of his co-defendants were easily acquitted. Soon after, Fénéon became the editor of the Revue Blanche, where he featured Debussy as his music critic and André Gide as his book critic and published Proust, Apollinaire, and Jarry, as well as his own translation of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. After the Revue Blanche folded, Fénéon went to work as a journalist, first for the conservative Le Figaro, then, starting in 1906, for the liberal broadsheet Le Matin, for which he composed the pieces collected in Novels in Three Lines. In later life Fénéon sold paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and for a while ran his own publishing house. In response to a proposal to publish a collection of his own work, he remarked, "I aspire only to silence." »

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and, most recently, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College. »

By Félix Fénéon
Translated and with an introduction by Luc Sante

Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d'oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.

"Fénéon's three-line news items, considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism.... They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon's Human Comedy." —From the Introduction by Luc Sante

Reviews

Luc Sante's very useful introduction offers readers like me, who were totally unfamiliar with Fénéon, a strong sense of his artistic genius (he brought the artist Georges Seurat to the public's attention and was the first French publisher of James Joyce's work) and his place in the history of modernism. To best appreciate Fénéon's work, simply open this treasure trove of stories and character at random and just begin reading.
— Nancy Pearl

Layered, ironic, amused, Fénéon's voice is unmistakable...a little yo-yo of a narrative that gives pleasure no matter how many times it's flung. The construction, the comic timing, the sly understatement that demands instant rereading.
— The New York Times

These fillers, or fait divers,...recount all manner of assault, graft, accident, labor strife, and murder in spare, factually tidy detail...These epigrammatic plots invite being read aloud, as well as other diversions.
— Bookforum

In these artfully concise summaries of news events, Fénéon, an enigmatic French journalist and publisher, provides a glimpse of a belle epoque that belongs not to artist or intellectuals but to locksmiths, plumbers, seamstresses and the occasional sex offender.
— Los Angeles Times

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $11.20 (20% off)

Aug 21, 2007
208 pages
ISBN: 1590172302
9781590172308
NYRB Classics
Suspense & Crime
Literature in French

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