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Novels in Three Lines
A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL
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.
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.
171 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1906
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About the author
Félix Fénéon
133 books27 followersFélix Fénéon was a Parisian anarchist and art critic during the late 1800s. He coined the term "Neo-impressionism" in 1886 to identify a group of artists led by Georges Seurat, and ardently promoted them.
The Fénéon Prize was established in 1949 by his wife based on proceeds from the sale of his art collection.
The Fénéon Prize was established in 1949 by his wife based on proceeds from the sale of his art collection.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 201 reviews
March 28, 2018
Absolutely brilliant. No, there is no 'plot' to speak of, no 'narrative.' What lies inside is something entirely original. Culled from Fénéon's year as a reporter, his distillation of the chaos of humanity is incomparable—all in three lines.
The book starts out curio-clever and delightful in its beyond-mordent delivery, but somewhere, as if by transubstantiation, there's a paradigmatic shift impossible to pinpoint. As the year rolls on, Fénéon the man emerges. It's in the way that he orders words, the angles he takes on his subject. While all are facts, you come to know him through his manipulation of language. His opinions on religion, love, money, poverty, and more slowly reveal themselves, and the author's handling of one far-too-recurring crime betrays a man with a lovely heart. What more could you ask for?
Everyone will get something different out of this. I got devastated.
The book starts out curio-clever and delightful in its beyond-mordent delivery, but somewhere, as if by transubstantiation, there's a paradigmatic shift impossible to pinpoint. As the year rolls on, Fénéon the man emerges. It's in the way that he orders words, the angles he takes on his subject. While all are facts, you come to know him through his manipulation of language. His opinions on religion, love, money, poverty, and more slowly reveal themselves, and the author's handling of one far-too-recurring crime betrays a man with a lovely heart. What more could you ask for?
Everyone will get something different out of this. I got devastated.
October 13, 2018
Introduction, by Luc Sante
--Novels in Three Lines
List of Illustrations
--Novels in Three Lines
List of Illustrations
January 11, 2021
Σίγουρα από τα πιο παράξενα και εντέλει ψυχαγωγικά βιβλία που έχω διαβάσει τον τελευταίο καιρό. Βέβαια, τι το ψυχαγωγικό μπορεί να υπάρχει σε μια συλλογή χιλίων και πλέον μικρών ειδήσεων με έκταση τριών σειρών (υπάρχουν, βέβαια, λίγες με έκταση δυο, τεσσάρων και πέντε σειρών) που στην πλειοψηφία τους έχουν να κάνουν με φόνους, αυτοκτονίες, χειροδικίες και κάθε είδους ατυχήματα; Ε, αν έχεις μαύρη αίσθηση του χιούμορ και εντοπίσεις την ειρωνεία ή τον κυνισμό που κρύβονται πίσω από κάποιες λέξεις και κάποια διακριτικά σχόλια του Φενεόν με τα οποία εμπλουτίζει τις περισσότερες από τις ειδήσεις που αραδιάζει, τότε η ώρα θα περάσει γενικά ευχάριστα (και σίγουρα γρήγορα). Αν διάβαζα το βιβλίο στο τρένο ή το λεωφορείο, οι συνεπιβάτες μου κάθε τρεις και λίγο θα γυρνούσαν το κεφάλι τους προς το μέρος μου, αφού θα αναφωνούσα από έκπληξη ή θα χαζογέλαγα με κάποια κωμικοτραγική είδηση. Πάντως εντύπωση μου κάνει που όλα αυτά τα τραγικά περιστατικά έγιναν σε διάστημα λίγων μηνών, το 1906. Τι φόνοι λόγω ερωτικής αντιζηλίας, τι φόνοι για ψύλλου πήδημα, τι αυτοκτονίες για τον έναν ή τον άλλο λόγο, τι ατυχήματα με τρένα, τρόλεϊ και άμαξες, τι ληστείες και απάτες... ο κακός χαμός, λέμε! Πάντως ένιωσα ότι μέσω όλων αυτών των ιστοριών πήρα λίγο μάτι από εκείνη την εποχή, πήρα μια ιδέα για τις κοινωνικοπολιτικές συνθήκες που επικρατούσαν στη Γαλλία των αρχών του 20ου αιώνα. Δεν ξέρω σε ποιον μπορεί να αρέσει ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο, ή ποιος είναι ο ιδανικός τρόπος για να το διαβάσεις (εγώ το διάβασα μονορούφι!), πάντως εμένα μου άρεσε, ήταν σίγουρα κάτι το διαφορετικό!
January 2, 2016
I'm a little obsessed with this book, which I keep sharing with others. My principal interest in it was and is the form. Experimental writing, formal experiments, different ways of representing the world, all interest me. Then I teach writing courses, the world of which focuses on argument, which I resist as one interested in and committed to narrative. I like multi-genre approaches to inquiry, too. These three line "novels," or "news" (nouvelle could maybe be either in French) are really short haiku-like disseminations of news events, stripped to the essence of the tale as Fénéon saw it.
Félix Fénéon was a French anarchist who every day in 1906 wrote three line news items in Le Matin. These were not collected until 1948, and not translated into English until 2007. His world view is bleak, and bemused,if you just flip through the book, as I initially did. Terrible things were happening to people in Paris every day, and Fénéon wrote of them, and I love the deftness and irony of the form, and of his telling. They're not all delightful or insightful, sometimes just the facts, ma'am.
They sometimes remind me of Edward Gorey without the illustrations.
The introduction by Luc Sante is wonderful.
Some examples, just randomly selected:
Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.
A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.
Their canoe having capsized, M. Guittard and M. Sabathe, of Marmande, drowned. Upon hearing the news, M. Guittard senior dropped dead.
A young woman was sitting on the ground in Choosy-le-Roi. The only identifying word that amnesia allowed her was "model."
He had bet he could drink 15 absinthes in succession while eating a kilo of beef. After the ninth, Theophile Papin, of Ivry, collapsed.
Joseph Vergers, of Belping, Pyrenees of Orientales, and Alphones Jerome, of Pouxeus, Vosges, drowned without intending to.
It suddenly occurs to me why I might be fascinated with the short form news: The three line novels/news are an early model for Twitter! Poetic tweets! I am inspired to do this for one year ion my twitter account. Maybe I will do it!
Félix Fénéon was a French anarchist who every day in 1906 wrote three line news items in Le Matin. These were not collected until 1948, and not translated into English until 2007. His world view is bleak, and bemused,if you just flip through the book, as I initially did. Terrible things were happening to people in Paris every day, and Fénéon wrote of them, and I love the deftness and irony of the form, and of his telling. They're not all delightful or insightful, sometimes just the facts, ma'am.
They sometimes remind me of Edward Gorey without the illustrations.
The introduction by Luc Sante is wonderful.
Some examples, just randomly selected:
Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.
A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.
Their canoe having capsized, M. Guittard and M. Sabathe, of Marmande, drowned. Upon hearing the news, M. Guittard senior dropped dead.
A young woman was sitting on the ground in Choosy-le-Roi. The only identifying word that amnesia allowed her was "model."
He had bet he could drink 15 absinthes in succession while eating a kilo of beef. After the ninth, Theophile Papin, of Ivry, collapsed.
Joseph Vergers, of Belping, Pyrenees of Orientales, and Alphones Jerome, of Pouxeus, Vosges, drowned without intending to.
It suddenly occurs to me why I might be fascinated with the short form news: The three line novels/news are an early model for Twitter! Poetic tweets! I am inspired to do this for one year ion my twitter account. Maybe I will do it!
February 10, 2011
"On the left shoulder of a newborn, whose corpse was found near the 22nd Artillery barracks, a tattoo: a cannon."
And thus begins the tale by Edgar Alan Poe...what, no. In fact, it is the story complete, published on a regular newsday on 1906 for Le Matin, a popular French broadsheet. Felix Feneon, a writer and intellectual who traveled in circles with the leading radicals of French literati of his time, humbly took a job for less than a year as the author of the faits-divers, a daily column of small news items. At the time, no one apparently noticed the skill and finesse he applied to his lines, but years later they were collected, with very little else of his writing, though he is acknowledged as the invisible support behind many a famed French author, including Proust, Apollinaire, Paul Claudel, and more. He employed, as the editor of his own publication, Revue blanche, Debussy as music critic, and Andre Gide as book critic. He translated to French works of Jane Austen and Edgar Alan Poe. It is claimed he discovered the artist Georges Seurat. He edited and published Rimbaud, James Joyce, Lautreamont.
So, you get the idea, he was an important cog in French intellectual circles, and likewise, perhaps a political activist, as well. He may or may not have thrown a bomb into a cafe normally patronized by politicians and financiers, which took the eye, by accident, of a fellow poet, Tailhade.
But Feneon reports here mostly on the more banal of news stories, not much anarchic rebellion or uprisings, but plenty of accidental and intentional death, collisions, strikes. In fact, one might think the French did nothing in the year 1906 but shoot each other, commit suicide for want of love or money, and slice themselves in half on the tracks of rails and streetcars. But while Le Monde might report, for the 56th time that year "M. Picco, of Gentilly, dies of stab wounds," Feneon artfully crafts this statement: "There had never been so much squabbling at the Picco home in Gentilly. Finally the wife's paring knife put to death the husband."
Another favorite stabbing is reported thus: "Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hat pin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Chatou, who had underestimated her."
If you have recently read How to Write a Sentence, which I strongly recommend you do, read this book immediately after, and you will take enormous pleasure in applying all the sentence deconstruction outlined in Fish's work upon the sculptured craft of Feneon's short prose. If you are a writer faced with an incorrigible blank canvas, pick any line at random and take it from there. If you have any interest in the ways words must pull their weight to bring meaning, you must read this book.
And thus begins the tale by Edgar Alan Poe...what, no. In fact, it is the story complete, published on a regular newsday on 1906 for Le Matin, a popular French broadsheet. Felix Feneon, a writer and intellectual who traveled in circles with the leading radicals of French literati of his time, humbly took a job for less than a year as the author of the faits-divers, a daily column of small news items. At the time, no one apparently noticed the skill and finesse he applied to his lines, but years later they were collected, with very little else of his writing, though he is acknowledged as the invisible support behind many a famed French author, including Proust, Apollinaire, Paul Claudel, and more. He employed, as the editor of his own publication, Revue blanche, Debussy as music critic, and Andre Gide as book critic. He translated to French works of Jane Austen and Edgar Alan Poe. It is claimed he discovered the artist Georges Seurat. He edited and published Rimbaud, James Joyce, Lautreamont.
So, you get the idea, he was an important cog in French intellectual circles, and likewise, perhaps a political activist, as well. He may or may not have thrown a bomb into a cafe normally patronized by politicians and financiers, which took the eye, by accident, of a fellow poet, Tailhade.
But Feneon reports here mostly on the more banal of news stories, not much anarchic rebellion or uprisings, but plenty of accidental and intentional death, collisions, strikes. In fact, one might think the French did nothing in the year 1906 but shoot each other, commit suicide for want of love or money, and slice themselves in half on the tracks of rails and streetcars. But while Le Monde might report, for the 56th time that year "M. Picco, of Gentilly, dies of stab wounds," Feneon artfully crafts this statement: "There had never been so much squabbling at the Picco home in Gentilly. Finally the wife's paring knife put to death the husband."
Another favorite stabbing is reported thus: "Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hat pin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Chatou, who had underestimated her."
If you have recently read How to Write a Sentence, which I strongly recommend you do, read this book immediately after, and you will take enormous pleasure in applying all the sentence deconstruction outlined in Fish's work upon the sculptured craft of Feneon's short prose. If you are a writer faced with an incorrigible blank canvas, pick any line at random and take it from there. If you have any interest in the ways words must pull their weight to bring meaning, you must read this book.
October 21, 2011
In 1906, Felix Feneon, an anarchist on his days off, wrote news items in three carefully crafted lines of one-column typeface. They read like French Haiku.
to-wit:
"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
At Saint-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue three people.
Harold Bauer and Casals will give a concert today in San Sebastian. Besides that, they may fight a duel.
Seventy-year-old beggar Verniot, of Clichy, died of hunger. His pallet disgorged 2,000 francs. But no one should make generalizations.
"To die like Joan of Arc!" cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The firemen stifled his ambition.
As if in mythological times, a ram has assaulted a sheperdess of Saint-Laurent, in the bed of the Var, where she was grazing her flock.
Adding salt to the sea, the Collburnary, which had that as its cargo, sank off Camaret, Finistere. The crew was rescued.
The artistry of a well-crafted sentence is apparent. Yet, the result is more clever than brilliant.
Dismemberments, suicides, adulteries gone wrong. Repeated often enough by Felix to bore Tony.
to-wit:
"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
At Saint-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue three people.
Harold Bauer and Casals will give a concert today in San Sebastian. Besides that, they may fight a duel.
Seventy-year-old beggar Verniot, of Clichy, died of hunger. His pallet disgorged 2,000 francs. But no one should make generalizations.
"To die like Joan of Arc!" cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The firemen stifled his ambition.
As if in mythological times, a ram has assaulted a sheperdess of Saint-Laurent, in the bed of the Var, where she was grazing her flock.
Adding salt to the sea, the Collburnary, which had that as its cargo, sank off Camaret, Finistere. The crew was rescued.
The artistry of a well-crafted sentence is apparent. Yet, the result is more clever than brilliant.
Dismemberments, suicides, adulteries gone wrong. Repeated often enough by Felix to bore Tony.
February 8, 2011
A beautifully illustrated book with charming, mordant three-line epitaphs that taste of the dry wit of Edward Gorey. The illustrations are collage-style, much like Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python illustrations, with photos, ink, markers and possibly crayon. Unlike Gorey, these scenarios are not fictional. They were brief news items written in a French newspaper in 1906 by Felix Fénéon, a member of the literati and an anarchist.
Some of the dark tidbits made me giggle. Some were rather sad. They all captured an intriguing tone of turn-of-the-century France. Overall, it’s an evocative collection, but can they really be considered three line “novels?” True, Hemmingway wrote a six word “novel” that he claimed was his best work.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Pretty sharp, that. But in this case, I was left wanting a bit more after tearing through this $24.95 hardback in about half an hour. Enjoyed, yes. But probably better to borrow from the library.
Some of the dark tidbits made me giggle. Some were rather sad. They all captured an intriguing tone of turn-of-the-century France. Overall, it’s an evocative collection, but can they really be considered three line “novels?” True, Hemmingway wrote a six word “novel” that he claimed was his best work.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Pretty sharp, that. But in this case, I was left wanting a bit more after tearing through this $24.95 hardback in about half an hour. Enjoyed, yes. But probably better to borrow from the library.
February 23, 2025
Recensione in tre parole per Romanzi in tre righe:
Sono
Estremamente
Perplesso.
Sono
Estremamente
Perplesso.
February 23, 2025
Freddure d'antan sotto forma di brevi trafiletti di cronaca d'incerta veridicità.
Alcune sono invecchiate, altre restano fulminanti.
Il saggio finale sull’ineffabile figura di Félix Fénéon merita tantissimo.
Alcune sono invecchiate, altre restano fulminanti.
Neuilly. Dopo avere sistemato in casa del suo padrone, assente, una signora allegra, il famulo Silot è scomparso portandosi via tutto: tranne la signora.
Il saggio finale sull’ineffabile figura di Félix Fénéon merita tantissimo.
January 24, 2010
What a strange book! Read this one, and you will reconsider the whole notion of the French being a rarefied and civilized race. Novels in Three Lines consists of nothing hundreds of two- and three-line news pieces, usually bizarre, violent, and occasionally mysterious. Its author, Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was at one and the same time an anarchist, a litterateur, and a champion of the arts (he discovered Toulouse-Lautrec). Yet, however well connected he was, he preferred to cling to the shadows: "Je n'aspire qu'au silence," was how he put it.
In 1906, he wrote these "novels in three lines" for Le Matin, a liberal broadsheet. Here are a few selections, just to give you the flavor of the work:
"Again and again Mme Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields."
"Mme Fournier, M Vouin, M Septeuil, of Sucy, Tripleval, Septeuil, hanged themselves: neurasthenia, cancer, unemployment."
"A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake."
The religious repetition of names, places, and means of mayhem become like a sort of haiku. It reminds me of a book that came out almost thirty years ago, Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, except with Fénéon, the method is pure poetry, rather than the combination of photographs and longer news stories.
In 1906, he wrote these "novels in three lines" for Le Matin, a liberal broadsheet. Here are a few selections, just to give you the flavor of the work:
"Again and again Mme Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields."
"Mme Fournier, M Vouin, M Septeuil, of Sucy, Tripleval, Septeuil, hanged themselves: neurasthenia, cancer, unemployment."
"A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake."
The religious repetition of names, places, and means of mayhem become like a sort of haiku. It reminds me of a book that came out almost thirty years ago, Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, except with Fénéon, the method is pure poetry, rather than the combination of photographs and longer news stories.
October 19, 2016
Thoroughly enjoyable. A book designed for easy browsing and riffling through. You can pick it up; read a few of these items, and then set it down again.
Really, it's one of the finest examples of its type I have come across. Pithy, terse, quizzical encomiums plucked from the ranks of everyday life.
Superb in their selection: suicides, venereal diseases, executions, street accidents, horses bolting, men killed cleaning their pistols, suspicious packages, foundlings and orphans, strikes, riots, embezzlements, blackmails, husbands shooting their wives; wives-poisoning-their-lovers.
This is livin'!
My favorite so far:
'His head injury was not serious, believed Kremer--of Pont-a-Moussan--who continued working for a few hours, and then dropped dead.'
There is an art inherent to making succinct statements. Perfectly punctuated, too. Newspapers--from which these morsels are all drawn--show how it's done. This is a non-fictive work!
Thus: a superb format for a shelf or a coffee table, because every page intrigues.
And the lesson of the book is clear: the human condition never changes. Newspaper obit and police blotters are the same from era to era. There were morons a hundred years ago and there are just as many morons today. More!
Really, it's one of the finest examples of its type I have come across. Pithy, terse, quizzical encomiums plucked from the ranks of everyday life.
Superb in their selection: suicides, venereal diseases, executions, street accidents, horses bolting, men killed cleaning their pistols, suspicious packages, foundlings and orphans, strikes, riots, embezzlements, blackmails, husbands shooting their wives; wives-poisoning-their-lovers.
This is livin'!
My favorite so far:
'His head injury was not serious, believed Kremer--of Pont-a-Moussan--who continued working for a few hours, and then dropped dead.'
There is an art inherent to making succinct statements. Perfectly punctuated, too. Newspapers--from which these morsels are all drawn--show how it's done. This is a non-fictive work!
Thus: a superb format for a shelf or a coffee table, because every page intrigues.
And the lesson of the book is clear: the human condition never changes. Newspaper obit and police blotters are the same from era to era. There were morons a hundred years ago and there are just as many morons today. More!
Read
April 29, 2015If you’ve wandered extensively around the Museum of Modern Art, you know this otherwise obscure author, because he’s the subject of a great painting by Paul Signac in which Félix holds a tophat and cane, and offers a flower to… no one visible. Behind him kaleidoscopic colors swirl. Signac invented psychedelia to describe Félix Fénéon – and in this book we learn why. In 1906 Félix worked at a newspaper called Le Matin, where he had a job summarizing obscure news items. This he transformed into a pre-Dadaist (anonymous) art form. Here’s one:
“On the riverbank at Saint-Cloud were found the saber and uniform of Baudet, the soldier who disappeared the 11th. Murder, suicide, or hoax?”
And here’s a second:
“Between Ville-du-Bois and Montlhéry, vagrants beat to a pulp Thomas, a tailor, and emptied his pockets.”
Reading 1066 of these – nimbly translated by Luc Sante – slowly redefines “literature” in one’s mind. The glaring uncertainty of life, its manifold dangers, yet the love one may feel even for a stranger – with no last name – inspire these pieces. Fénéon had a sense of humor like no one else on earth.
“On the riverbank at Saint-Cloud were found the saber and uniform of Baudet, the soldier who disappeared the 11th. Murder, suicide, or hoax?”
And here’s a second:
“Between Ville-du-Bois and Montlhéry, vagrants beat to a pulp Thomas, a tailor, and emptied his pockets.”
Reading 1066 of these – nimbly translated by Luc Sante – slowly redefines “literature” in one’s mind. The glaring uncertainty of life, its manifold dangers, yet the love one may feel even for a stranger – with no last name – inspire these pieces. Fénéon had a sense of humor like no one else on earth.
January 22, 2011
Delightful! Could function as a lifetime of writing prompts. "Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hatpin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Chatou, who had underestimated her."
August 21, 2014
A real find - this is a collection of 3 line newspaper reports by the enigmatic Felix Feneon. The introduction by Luc Sante is both illustrative and fantastic (it may be the high-point of the whole book.) Feneon is something of a Zelig figure whose literary output was limited, but the anonymity and fun of this particular form plays to his strengths. Think David Markson mixed with Lydia Davis, and add to that a strongly representative look at early 20th century France. The stories are often hilarious, sometimes moving, and it's fun to track certain oblique plots (this is Markson-y) through time: people trying to teach children about god; notorious phonewire thieves, fever, suicide. Feneon seems particularly fascinated by suicide, and, as the title suggests, there is a depth to many of these. The ultimate iceberg book. As a writer, it is up there with The Anatomy of Melancholy and Cheever's letters as an idea generator. The translation is a bit funky at points because it is necessarily obsessed with word-order - that gives these pieces a touch of poetry.
Here are 4 of my favorites:
- "If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
- Bonnaut, a locksmith in Montreuil, was chatting on his doorstep when the gangster called Shoe Face struck him twice with a knife.
- At Sainte-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue all three people.
- At the Trianon Palace, a visitor disrobed and climbed into the imperial bed. It is disputed whether he is, as he claims, Napoleon IV.
Here are 4 of my favorites:
- "If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
- Bonnaut, a locksmith in Montreuil, was chatting on his doorstep when the gangster called Shoe Face struck him twice with a knife.
- At Sainte-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue all three people.
- At the Trianon Palace, a visitor disrobed and climbed into the imperial bed. It is disputed whether he is, as he claims, Napoleon IV.
May 3, 2014
Luc Sante's Introduction is Five Stars by itself. Feneon, this fascinating character, is Five Stars also.
People dying on every page. Most of the murders, suicides, accidents and the occasional miracle in 'Novels In Three Lines' could be on today's news, such is human nature. I prefer Feneon's brief descriptions to the Media News as Entertainment shows in this day and age. Today's news reporting would be better if it followed Feneon's format. I don't watch Television or listen to any Radio.
A few examples -
"Women suckling their infants argued the worker's cause to the director of the streetcar line in Toulon. He was unmoved."
"It was believed that work would start up again today at the steelworks in Pamiers. A delusion".
Fallen from a train travelling at high speed, Maria Steckel, 3, of Saint-Germain, was found playing on the gravel ballast".
People dying on every page. Most of the murders, suicides, accidents and the occasional miracle in 'Novels In Three Lines' could be on today's news, such is human nature. I prefer Feneon's brief descriptions to the Media News as Entertainment shows in this day and age. Today's news reporting would be better if it followed Feneon's format. I don't watch Television or listen to any Radio.
A few examples -
"Women suckling their infants argued the worker's cause to the director of the streetcar line in Toulon. He was unmoved."
"It was believed that work would start up again today at the steelworks in Pamiers. A delusion".
Fallen from a train travelling at high speed, Maria Steckel, 3, of Saint-Germain, was found playing on the gravel ballast".
May 15, 2014
Predictably, after reading "Novels in Three Lines" by Félix Fénéon, Jim Leckband tries to prove he is witty by writing his review in the same style. He is wrong.
September 28, 2009
My Novel in Three Lines:
Free ride to R.M. in a police cruiser Sept. 28 to make positive the I.D. of a prowler he caught breaking into his father's girlfriend's car at 1:30 a.m. A criminal with a fashion statement: the elegant perp's black clothes were offset with a zebra patterned hoodie.
***
One thing is certain: France in 1906 was a dangerous place for pedestrians and lovers.
Terrorism also was a concern, with bomb threats at just about every juncture (usually a scare tactic: bags of sand, pipes of sugar - Oui, Monsieur! Zand, now, but wait unteel I geet mah handz on zum goonpowdar!) - indeed, the author himself was an anarchist-dandy suspected of the bombing of a restaurant.
Highly recommend this to anybody who has every had to boil down some serious topic to a paragraph or a headline. Contextulize a photograph with names, dates and circumstance. To poets, to tweeters.
***
Free ride to R.M. in a police cruiser Sept. 28 to make positive the I.D. of a prowler he caught breaking into his father's girlfriend's car at 1:30 a.m. A criminal with a fashion statement: the elegant perp's black clothes were offset with a zebra patterned hoodie.
***
One thing is certain: France in 1906 was a dangerous place for pedestrians and lovers.
Terrorism also was a concern, with bomb threats at just about every juncture (usually a scare tactic: bags of sand, pipes of sugar - Oui, Monsieur! Zand, now, but wait unteel I geet mah handz on zum goonpowdar!) - indeed, the author himself was an anarchist-dandy suspected of the bombing of a restaurant.
Highly recommend this to anybody who has every had to boil down some serious topic to a paragraph or a headline. Contextulize a photograph with names, dates and circumstance. To poets, to tweeters.
***
January 15, 2024
Having read all three of David Markson's books in which he compresses fascinating information into small paragraphs, truths about artists, writers, painters, composers and more, gossip and deaths and more, I was interested in reading Novels in Three Lines, by Feneon, who took the tidbits run in newspapers in France and compressed them too, first actually. This book is comprised of something like 1000 such tidbits, and all are focused on happenings in France in 1906, politics, strikes, various unrests, deaths, jealousy, marriage and more. An interesting look at a country in a particular year, but I have to say Markson's books - Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel - grabbed me far more. So much so that I was obsessed with reading them, couldn't stop. Still, this one is a fascinating look at a specific time and place, and the forward by Luc Sante is worth reading.
February 2, 2016
A few weeks/months? ago I wrote a rave review of Félix Fénéon's collection of three line news items (nouvelle can be novel or news or new in French, correct me if I am slightly wrong) that he published anonymously in a French daily.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
Fénéon didn't want his name associated with the writing for some reason. He was quite possibly an anarchist, worked in writing and editing, stayed pretty much off the grid after beating a terrorist bombing charge that may or may not have been true. He died pretty much unknown in 1944 but his girlfriend had save more than 1,000 of his published pieces, written in and around 1906, got them published, and they were not translated into English until 2007 by Luc Sante who recognized their genius!! Dry, ironic, usually about mishaps sometimes ending in violent death, they could often be seen as wryly humorous. I do see them that way. Here's some examples not in my review. And yes, they seem to be culled from actually true events that came to the notice of the newspaper. News fashioned into three line novels!
"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
At Saint-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue three people.
Harold Bauer and Casals will give a concert today in San Sebastian. Besides that, they may fight a duel.
Seventy-year-old beggar Verniot, of Clichy, died of hunger. His pallet disgorged 2,000 francs. But no one should make generalizations.
"To die like Joan of Arc!" cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The firemen stifled his ambition.
As if in mythological times, a ram has assaulted a sheperdess of Saint-Laurent, in the bed of the Var, where she was grazing her flock.
Adding salt to the sea, the Collburnary, which had that as its cargo, sank off Camaret, Finistere. The crew was rescued.
Dismemberments, suicides, adulteries gone wrong. Repeated often enough by Felix to bore Tony.
Wryly, and admittedly a little darkly hilarious, yes? Haiku news. 1906 tweets!!! By Edmund Gorey's spiritual brother!
The present volume is the art project of Joanna Neborsky, who worked with the famed and funny NY illustrator Maira Kalman, who, herself working with Daniel Handler now on a photograph project, knows a good joke when she hears/sees one. Neborsky's project is collage, colorful.
I like Neborsky's book, it's fun and funny and entertaining, but it is way way too short. It needs more of Fénéon's novels! But in this hardcover version, with lovely cover art, it is an attractive illustrated text.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
Fénéon didn't want his name associated with the writing for some reason. He was quite possibly an anarchist, worked in writing and editing, stayed pretty much off the grid after beating a terrorist bombing charge that may or may not have been true. He died pretty much unknown in 1944 but his girlfriend had save more than 1,000 of his published pieces, written in and around 1906, got them published, and they were not translated into English until 2007 by Luc Sante who recognized their genius!! Dry, ironic, usually about mishaps sometimes ending in violent death, they could often be seen as wryly humorous. I do see them that way. Here's some examples not in my review. And yes, they seem to be culled from actually true events that came to the notice of the newspaper. News fashioned into three line novels!
"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
At Saint-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue three people.
Harold Bauer and Casals will give a concert today in San Sebastian. Besides that, they may fight a duel.
Seventy-year-old beggar Verniot, of Clichy, died of hunger. His pallet disgorged 2,000 francs. But no one should make generalizations.
"To die like Joan of Arc!" cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The firemen stifled his ambition.
As if in mythological times, a ram has assaulted a sheperdess of Saint-Laurent, in the bed of the Var, where she was grazing her flock.
Adding salt to the sea, the Collburnary, which had that as its cargo, sank off Camaret, Finistere. The crew was rescued.
Dismemberments, suicides, adulteries gone wrong. Repeated often enough by Felix to bore Tony.
Wryly, and admittedly a little darkly hilarious, yes? Haiku news. 1906 tweets!!! By Edmund Gorey's spiritual brother!
The present volume is the art project of Joanna Neborsky, who worked with the famed and funny NY illustrator Maira Kalman, who, herself working with Daniel Handler now on a photograph project, knows a good joke when she hears/sees one. Neborsky's project is collage, colorful.
I like Neborsky's book, it's fun and funny and entertaining, but it is way way too short. It needs more of Fénéon's novels! But in this hardcover version, with lovely cover art, it is an attractive illustrated text.
July 10, 2014
My Amazon review:
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.
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.
February 17, 2009
Before there was flash fiction, or people writing novels through text messaging, or cell phones at all for that matter, there was Félix Fénéon's 'Novels in Three Lines'. In 1906, he wrote began writing these 1,220 news summaries in three lines or less for a Parisian newspaper, mostly about theft and crime, using creative syntax to add new meanings to the events. This book collects those lines, as the title suggests, but the macabre element of each adds a violent twist that leaves me suspicious of strangers. I imagine some of them would fit as twitter posts, but I'm not sure whether or not twitter is admissible as criminal evidence yet... so you might hold off reposting these in the first person. Until we hook up Feneon's long decayed brain to the internet, this book may have to suffice, but if anyone knows of someone who twitters stuff like this, please share:
Atop the train station in Enghien a painter was electrocuted. His jaws could be heard clacking, then he fell on the glass roof.
Long the butt of jokes of his work-mate Boissonnet, Canet, of Saint-Cloud, brained him with a soldering iron.
Strikers in Ronchamp, Huate-Saone, threw in the river a worker who insisted on continuing his labor.
Atop the train station in Enghien a painter was electrocuted. His jaws could be heard clacking, then he fell on the glass roof.
Long the butt of jokes of his work-mate Boissonnet, Canet, of Saint-Cloud, brained him with a soldering iron.
Strikers in Ronchamp, Huate-Saone, threw in the river a worker who insisted on continuing his labor.
November 10, 2007
The perfect book for the bathtub. The Right size and you can pick it up anywhere without worrying about the narration. Felix Feneon, a French trouble-maker of the 1900's wrote three lines dealing with crime, murder, suicides, etc. for a daily newspaper. Luc Sante (the author of the incredible collection of essays "Kill All Your Darlings") edited and translated the three-lined text like headlines. Beautifully written with a dark tinge of humor, and yes only three lines!
June 25, 2010
this was another recommendation from amazon - but I noticed I'd commented on a thread by RM recommending this book, don't know why I didn't add it then, it looks fantastic.
...it is non fiction, but reads like little novels as the title suggests. Review will follow - I've got four or five books now to catch up with and one day when I finish the editing I'm doing I'll sit down and write them all.
...it is non fiction, but reads like little novels as the title suggests. Review will follow - I've got four or five books now to catch up with and one day when I finish the editing I'm doing I'll sit down and write them all.
March 13, 2024
A glimpse of 1906: to break up the monotony of death by passion, poverty or greed, some pilfered telephone cables, assaulted girls and old women alike, or squabbled over the value of a crucifix to schoolchildren. Fires, trains and automobiles menaced human beings. Soldiers were ubiquitous.
January 10, 2018
Me gusta la idea, pero se hace repetitivo.
January 25, 2021
Un signore entra in un caffè.
SPLASH.
Ecco, questo romanzo mi ha riportato alla mente questa battutona, ed è calato IL GELO. In realtà io mi aspettavo qualcosa come Ottantasette tragedie in due battute (leggetelo, è geniale!!) ma sono raccontini senza capo né coda, che probabilmente noi oggi non possiamo comprendere perché ci mancano proprio gli strumenti per apprezzarli.. Magari nel 1906 quando sono stati pubblicati erano la cosa più cazzuta di sempre, chi lo sa!
Ah, tra l'altro l'Adelphi ha fatto ***una selezione*** degli oltre mille raccontini dell'autore, sulla base di che, non si sa.. Magari tra mille qualcuno caruccio lo avremmo trovato! Il libro poi ha un costo per pagina che supera praticamente il prezzo a carato dei diamanti.. Quindi il mio consiglio è di lasciar passare come se non esistesse questa opera, di prenderla con Kindle unlimited o, se si legge in francese, cercare l'opera completa :D
Giusto per non lasciarvi con l'amaro in bocca dello SPLASH, uno dei racconti:
Popsugar reading challenge: The shortest (by pages) on your TBR
Around the year in 52 books:
A book from the Are you Well read in world literature list
SPLASH.
Ecco, questo romanzo mi ha riportato alla mente questa battutona, ed è calato IL GELO. In realtà io mi aspettavo qualcosa come Ottantasette tragedie in due battute (leggetelo, è geniale!!) ma sono raccontini senza capo né coda, che probabilmente noi oggi non possiamo comprendere perché ci mancano proprio gli strumenti per apprezzarli.. Magari nel 1906 quando sono stati pubblicati erano la cosa più cazzuta di sempre, chi lo sa!
Ah, tra l'altro l'Adelphi ha fatto ***una selezione*** degli oltre mille raccontini dell'autore, sulla base di che, non si sa.. Magari tra mille qualcuno caruccio lo avremmo trovato! Il libro poi ha un costo per pagina che supera praticamente il prezzo a carato dei diamanti.. Quindi il mio consiglio è di lasciar passare come se non esistesse questa opera, di prenderla con Kindle unlimited o, se si legge in francese, cercare l'opera completa :D
Giusto per non lasciarvi con l'amaro in bocca dello SPLASH, uno dei racconti:
Senza casa né lavoro, Louis Lamarre aveva però qualche soldo in tasca. È entrato in una drogheria di Saint-Denis, ha comprato un litro di petrolio, e se l'è bevuto. (SPLASH.)
Popsugar reading challenge: The shortest (by pages) on your TBR
Around the year in 52 books:
A book from the Are you Well read in world literature list
January 12, 2024
Per dirla con le parole di Alfred Jarry:
-celui qui silence -
-celui qui silence -
November 12, 2020
Remarkable. Essentially a collection of 1000+ ultra-minimal News In Brief items Fénéon wrote for the newspaper Le Matin in 1906. Written with incredible style - boiling down news items to their essence and adding wry commentary, they're a salutory lesson in concision and both darkly funny and extremely moving at times. I started highlighting my favourites but there were too many.
April 22, 2022
Some of them are brilliant, some of them are meh, and some of them are clearly missing jokes/puns that didn't translate. It was a lot like reading a writer's workbook.
January 8, 2019
A Verlinghem (Nord), Mme Ridez, 30 ans, a été égorgée par un voleur, cependant que son mari était à la messe.
Published during 1906 in Le Matin, a Paris daily newspaper, were short news items under the heading Nouvelles en trois lignes. As translator Luc Sante makes clear in his introduction this heading can either mean 'the news in three lines' or 'novellas in three lines' and, in the writings of the author Félix Fénéon, the intention must be that it can mean both. For here, indeed in three lines as they appear in the paper's columns, such faits-divers are novelettes in miniature fashioned from genuine news items, each presented as a précis that can be shocking, humorous or just weirdly banal.
Thus while Monsieur Ridez is no doubt shriving his soul attending Mass his unfortunate wife is having her throat slit by a thief. The juxtaposition of the mundane and the violent that characterises a good many of these nouvelles is, unsurprisingly, a facet of Fénéon himself who, while a supporter of the arts and artists (such as Paul Signac, who painted Fénéon's portrait) was also an anarchist sympathiser and a suspected terrorist bomber in the 1890s.
These days the 'three-line tale' is a popular discipline for flash fiction writers and, liberally interpreted, can be three sentences long or indeed three paragraphs. But in fin-de-siècle Europe (and, indeed, later) 'news in brief' items were a staple of newspapers. Fénéon's skill was to raise them to new levels of artistry, as these few examples, chosen at random from this compendium, demonstrate:
Once again, people have been stealing telephone cables: in Paray, Athis-Mons, and Morangis, 36,000 feet; in Longjumeau, 10 miles.
Mignon, an engraver, and M. Dumesnil, of M. Briand's cabinet, have come to blows in Nemours. Government injured art's elbow.
These two examples occur back to back in these pages:
At the station in Mâcon, Mouroux had his legs severed by an engine. "Look at my feet on the tracks!" he cried, then fainted.
With a four-tined pitchfork, farmhand David, of Courtemaux, Loiret, killed his wife, whom he, erroneously, thought unfaithful.
Not all items involve extreme violence:
During a scuffle in Grenoble, three demonstrators were arrested by the brigade, who were hissed by the crowd.
Thankfully no deaths resulted from the following piece, at least not directly:
How will we smoke? On the heels of the pipe makers of Saint-Claude, now the cigarette-paper makers of Saint-Girons have gone on strike.
Human inanities abound in these items: there are disputes to do with the separation of Church and State, instances of marital jealousy, accidental and deliberate suicides, childish escapades gone wrong. While localised natural disasters are noted -- flooding, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, hospital fires "that hurt no one" -- mostly Fénéon is intent on deadpan reporting of lived stupidities and avoidable injuries and deaths. The reader can't help smiling while simultaneously being appalled.
Luc Sante discusses Fénéon's colourful life in detail and it's clear the writer was a singular individual, odd for any age and not just his own. Sante believes these miniatures, "considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism. It heralds the age of mass media, via a sensibility formed by the cadences and symmetries of classical prose; forecasts a century of statistics, while foregrounding individual quotidian detail; invites speed of consumption, while manifesting time-consuming labor of execution . . ."
I'm no authority on modernism so can't quibble on any of this; but when Sante declaims at length on Fénéon's craft he may be deliberately pointing up the Frenchman's concision. Reading long sequences of these nouvelles initially tempted me to imitate Fénéon's extreme miserliness with words in this review, but I found it impossible to maintain. Instead I leave it to the author, who does it so much better, to have the last word:
Published during 1906 in Le Matin, a Paris daily newspaper, were short news items under the heading Nouvelles en trois lignes. As translator Luc Sante makes clear in his introduction this heading can either mean 'the news in three lines' or 'novellas in three lines' and, in the writings of the author Félix Fénéon, the intention must be that it can mean both. For here, indeed in three lines as they appear in the paper's columns, such faits-divers are novelettes in miniature fashioned from genuine news items, each presented as a précis that can be shocking, humorous or just weirdly banal.
Thus while Monsieur Ridez is no doubt shriving his soul attending Mass his unfortunate wife is having her throat slit by a thief. The juxtaposition of the mundane and the violent that characterises a good many of these nouvelles is, unsurprisingly, a facet of Fénéon himself who, while a supporter of the arts and artists (such as Paul Signac, who painted Fénéon's portrait) was also an anarchist sympathiser and a suspected terrorist bomber in the 1890s.
These days the 'three-line tale' is a popular discipline for flash fiction writers and, liberally interpreted, can be three sentences long or indeed three paragraphs. But in fin-de-siècle Europe (and, indeed, later) 'news in brief' items were a staple of newspapers. Fénéon's skill was to raise them to new levels of artistry, as these few examples, chosen at random from this compendium, demonstrate:
Once again, people have been stealing telephone cables: in Paray, Athis-Mons, and Morangis, 36,000 feet; in Longjumeau, 10 miles.
Mignon, an engraver, and M. Dumesnil, of M. Briand's cabinet, have come to blows in Nemours. Government injured art's elbow.
These two examples occur back to back in these pages:
At the station in Mâcon, Mouroux had his legs severed by an engine. "Look at my feet on the tracks!" he cried, then fainted.
With a four-tined pitchfork, farmhand David, of Courtemaux, Loiret, killed his wife, whom he, erroneously, thought unfaithful.
Not all items involve extreme violence:
During a scuffle in Grenoble, three demonstrators were arrested by the brigade, who were hissed by the crowd.
Thankfully no deaths resulted from the following piece, at least not directly:
How will we smoke? On the heels of the pipe makers of Saint-Claude, now the cigarette-paper makers of Saint-Girons have gone on strike.
Human inanities abound in these items: there are disputes to do with the separation of Church and State, instances of marital jealousy, accidental and deliberate suicides, childish escapades gone wrong. While localised natural disasters are noted -- flooding, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, hospital fires "that hurt no one" -- mostly Fénéon is intent on deadpan reporting of lived stupidities and avoidable injuries and deaths. The reader can't help smiling while simultaneously being appalled.
Luc Sante discusses Fénéon's colourful life in detail and it's clear the writer was a singular individual, odd for any age and not just his own. Sante believes these miniatures, "considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism. It heralds the age of mass media, via a sensibility formed by the cadences and symmetries of classical prose; forecasts a century of statistics, while foregrounding individual quotidian detail; invites speed of consumption, while manifesting time-consuming labor of execution . . ."
I'm no authority on modernism so can't quibble on any of this; but when Sante declaims at length on Fénéon's craft he may be deliberately pointing up the Frenchman's concision. Reading long sequences of these nouvelles initially tempted me to imitate Fénéon's extreme miserliness with words in this review, but I found it impossible to maintain. Instead I leave it to the author, who does it so much better, to have the last word:
In Oyonnax, Mlle Cottet, 18,
threw acid in the face of M. Besnard, 25.
Love, obviously.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 201 reviews