Novels in Three Lines (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

by Felix Feneon (Author), Luc Sante (Introduction)
Key Phrases: colonial regiment, labor exchange, Artillery Regiment, May Queen, Les Lilas

Editorial Reviews

From 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)
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Review
"In these artfully concise summaries of news events, Feneon, 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

"A Parisian anarchist, dandy and literary editor born in 1861, Feneon was at his most eloquent when saying as little as possible. Novels in Three Lines is a collection of what newspaper editors used to call squibs - very short news items, similar to the sentence fragments that populate modern cable news crawls. The book collects more than 1,000 news items (what the French call faits divers) printed in Le Matin in 1906, all anonymously written by Feneon. Century-old one-liners from French fishwrap might sound like a shaky premise for a book, but these true-life tales of murder, revenge, suicide, deceit and religious strife feature the fine carpentry of a literary stylist." --Toronto Star

“Veering from horrific to hilarious and offering an acute overview of life at the time, these ultra-condensed tales of politics and mayhem hover between poetry and prose and redefine nonfiction... it is a seminal modernist masterpiece of form and sensibility, and still provocative. Sante did a brilliant job of translating it into English.” –CHOICE

"[D]eliciously tart and brilliantly compacted micro-vignettes of daily life in all its ironies, passions and dark mysteries." --Sukhdev Sandhu

"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

"Layered, ironic, amused, Feneon'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

"Today's lurid tabloid journalism has nothing on Novel in Three Lines, originally published anonymously in the French daily Le Matin in 1906. The man behind them was one Felix Feneon, part-time anarchist, and they reveal a delight in the fateful cruelties of life: Random shootings, premeditated suicides, and awful robberies were his main fixations. It's no insult to our own taste for the sensational when we admit to finding Paris the city more fascinating than Paris the woman." --New York Magazine

"The Feneon , like a book of haikus entirely devoted to suicide, murder, fatal accidents, and incestuous sex, is a creepy introduction to the shadowed brain cavity of a Neo-Impressionist who certainly believed in 'propaganda by the deed' and may have plotted one or more anarchist assassinations." --Harper's Magazine

"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." —Publishers Weekly

“[T]he “Nouvelles en trois lignes”…were simply news items concerning accidents, quarrels, mayhem, fires and murders, reduced to minimal length and rendered tragic-comic or ludicrous by artful diction, euphemism, understatement and other devices. They have stylistic interest, contain political and social overtones, and convey a concept of the absurdity of life.” —French Review

“Fénéon is best known today for his early championing of such men as Arthur Rimbaud, Francis Poictevin, and Jules Laforgue; for the art criticism that helped establish Neo-Impressionism…; for his Nouvelles in trois lignes, the pithy and often startlingly phrased newspapers accounts of current events that have been cited as predecessors of ‘minimal’ story writing; and for the exhibitions and sales of contemporary paintings he organized at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery after 1906.” —American Historical Review

“As a regular journalist, Fénéon is best remembered for his devastatingly spare News stories in Three Lines for Le Matin–cruelly deadpan summaries of the minor dramas of the day.” —Burlington Magazine

“In his time, Félix Fénéon was one of the most influential critics of art and literature in fin-de-siecle Paris… He was, clearly, a man to whom history–cultural history–owes some recognition.” —The New York Times Book Review (James R. Mellow)

“Félix Fénéon, editor, critic and stylist extraordinaire...the most brilliant critic of the day.” —The New York Times (John Russell)

“[T]he era's most influential art critic” —The New Statesman

“The fastidious editor Félix Fénéon, who placed an incisive style in the service of avant-garde interests on every front, married rhetoric and action, art and politics. Closely associated with Symbolism, and with the Neo-Impressionism whose theoretical and formal basis he defined in 1886, Fénéon was probably the most important art critic of the late nineteenth century. While conscientiously clerking at the War Office, he used his discerning eye to appreciate literary and visual subversion…” —The New Republic

"[T]he greatest critic of his age" —William Everdell author of The First Moderns

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172302
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172308
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #236,536 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars if haikus were cold assessments of society, they'd be this awesome, October 16, 2007

By	J. Cole - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

if you think people drowning, killing themselves, getting hit by cars, or living sad lives at the turn of the 20th century in france has the potential to be laugh-out-loud funny, then you'll maybe piss yourself when you read this book.

it's not so much the content as it is Fénéon's impeccable timing that makes this book work. he turns a phrase, this guy. it's all just news blurbs, like the local stories from the usa today, but there's nothing about the execution that's even remotely similar.

one example - "Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected."

there are also some touching items.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Many Woes In Terse Prose, September 21, 2007

By	Laurel Hall (Oregon, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm ordering two more copies of this small book to send as gifts to friends who appreciate dark humor and irony. These tersely told tales are a delight and an inspiration. Readers may never again be able to read the newspaper without picking up imaginary scissors and a pen and paper.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More breadth here than it may first seem, March 13, 2009

By	Jeff Bursey - See all my reviews

None of today's major papers would print the types of obituaries and other news items Feneon wrote in the early years of the 20th century. They are mordant, cynical, joyful over the most bizarre and violent mishaps, attitudes and deaths, and crafted with the precision of a poet.

This book contains roughly one thousand 'novels' or life stories (or death stories) that summarize in the fewest words possible what a person expired of, what a city council fought over (usually religious matters), how this or that soldier behaved, and details of suicide (disembowelled, drowned, hanged), murder (knifed, shot), accident (slipping into machinery, being run over by cars), and mutilation (a lot of acid gets thrown around). You may think none of this could be funny, but Feneon's compression of events and his tone combine to make this book a rich, if narrow, slice of human behaviour.

Quoting from it would be like eating peanuts - impossible to stop. If you read a handful of entries, then you'll know immediately if it's what you might like. Or, you could give it as a gift to that person who's hard to shop for. Highly recommended. Luc Sante's introduction is very well done, and provides all the context one needs.