Blue Self-Portrait

"I tend to find first-person narratives difficult. They’re either too arch, too writerly, or not arch or writerly enough, a bit clunky. But I think when it is got right, like Noémi Lefebvre does here, it can be incredible. One of the reasons I called the prize the Republic of Consciousness is to push against this notion that neuroscience and materialism promote … that basically all we are is independent sets of firing neurons, and so we can’t know each other or relate beyond physical stimuli. Writing puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully. I think she captures something very essentially about how we think. We think we think in full sentences, but we don’t, we think in fragments. It’s when we reflect on our thoughts and how we think that we put them into full sentences. We don’t really have access to how fragmented our thoughts are as thinking is happening. What Lefebvre achieves in this book – like Eimear McBride in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing – to capture the simple fragments of thought she’s having. If she were to tell the story , she’d fill in the gaps; instead, she drops us into her mind as it’s happening. I like the brilliant combination of a slight gaucheness of articulation, while at the same time she’s reading the letters of Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann while sitting on an airplane … And yet the mixture of gaucheness and seriousness somehow doesn’t feel pretentious. The character is very charming, a little bit hopeless, slightly nihilistic, smart, but not confident. Personhood like that is quite difficult to do in literature. You end up with characters or symbols rather than something that feels real. And I liked spending time with her going from funny to serious to funny. Few novelists can combined Schoenberg’s painting and grieving cows. The designs promise a certain tonality. Galley Beggar have their black covers. In my day job, I did research into book finishes for a major publisher, and so I spent a lot of time walking around bookshops with customers trying to get a sense of why they pick up a certain book. It’s an implicit decision. You don’t sit down and study all the covers. You glance and pick one up instead of the others. And it was extraordinary how much attention the small press covers got – because they always look different. Sadly not. What’s also interesting is how quickly people put those books down again, because they don’t necessarily conform to the decision-making process that a normal reader wants. “Writing puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully” They pick up a paperback because they like the cover, but the next step is key: turning it over to read what it’s about. It’s as straightforward as that. And actually on the back of the original Galley Beggar books, for example, they would turn to the back of this striking black design, and not finding a plot blurb and rave reviews, and would it down again. It wasn’t making it easy for them to make a decision. They still have the black editions as special editions, but their bookshop editions are just a single colour, with the right essentials on the back. I suppose the point is: great design is crucial in construction an identity as a publishing house, but you still have to conform to how people buy books. Another thing is, if you ask a bookseller she’ll say, ‘If I were to be published I would want to be in hardback. But if you want to sell books, you should go straight into quality, premium paperback.’ Hardback is a vanity project. So the French flaps paperbacks of most of these small presses is right for the market."