Published in 2024
120 pages
Noémi Lefebvre was born in 1964 and lives in Lyon. She studied music for over 10 years as a child and later obtained her PhD on the subject of music education and national identity in Germany and France. She became a political scientist at CERAT de Grenoble II Institute. She is the author of three novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success in France: her debut novel L’Autoportrait bleu (2009), L’etat des sentiments a l’age adulte (2012) and L’enfance politique (2015). She is a regular contributor to the respected French investigative website Mediapart and to the bilingual French-German review La mer gelee.
Sophie Lewis has translated works from French and Portuguese by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Leïla Slimani, Mona Chollet and Annie Ernaux, as well as Natalia Borges Polesso, João Gilberto Noll, Sheyla Smanioto, Victor Heringer and Patrícia Melo, among others. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded the Shadow Heroes workshops enterprise. Lewis’s translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She was joint winner of the 2022 French-American Foundation prize for non-fiction translation, for Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild.
What is this book about?
An irreverent semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.
—We have read Proust but we’re not sure
—Who has really read Proust
—Besides a few Proustians
—We are no Proustians
—Despite not being anti-Proustian…
Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write—a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is “a madhouse of earthworm sentences” interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre’s work.
