Novels in Three Lines

June 18, 2007
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.

August 1, 2007
Murders, traffic accidents, suicides, political scandals, labor strikes: these are topics found in any newspaper today. Yet this book's "faits-divers", or "sundry events," were crafted by Fénéon over a century ago. Translated by Santé ("The Factory of Facts"), this curious work is a collection of news items Fénéon wrote in 1906 for "Le Matin", a Parisian daily newspaper. These three-line items have no equivalent in U.S. newspapers. More than brief reports or police blotter notes, they are succinct, minimalist accounts of the events of the day, covering almost anything from the mundane (an announcement for a civic association banquet) to the horrific (a dog who ate his dead master's head). Capturing the moment, and thus ephemeral in nature, these items are more like photographs or journalistic haikus or an outline for a novel. (Santé prefers to translate "nouvelles" here as "novels" rather than as "news.") Fénéon, who also edited literary journals and was involved in the post-impressionist art scene, turned these "faits-divers" into an art form, reflecting the modernist, bare-bones aesthetic of such contemporaries as Seurat, Mallarmé, and Toulouse-Lautrec. For academic libraries and other libraries collecting in the relevant genres.Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL

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