About the Book
Charlotte is the true story of Charlotte Salomon, born into a family stricken by suicide and a country at war but possessing an exceptional gift for painting. Just as she is coming in to her own as an artist, the Nazis come to power and, as a Jew, she is forced to flee from Berlin, from her family and her lover. Her short life ends tragically but not before she has left behind a unique legacy, the work entitled Life? or Theatre?, described as a song-play.
The author, David Foenkinos, came across Charlotte’s work through a friend and was immediately transfixed by it, becoming obsessed with finding out more about her. This book is his fictionalized biography of her life.
Format: ebook (225 pages) Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 2nd February 2017 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
This is an unusual book, a fictionalised biography that is set out as if it is a prose poem with each new sentence on a new line. However, poetic phrases are rare; many lines are prosaic.
The author’s obsession with Charlotte seems overwhelming at times, his discovery of her work “the unexpected climax to all my vague longings” and becoming in his words “an occupied country”. He recounts his many attempts to write the book, his writer’s block that was a “physical sensation, an oppression” until his realization of the single line structure the book should have.
Charlotte’s story is tragic: the suicide of many family members, including her mother, her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp. A great talent cut off in its prime.
The book’s shortcoming is it cannot convey the power of Charlotte’s work, only describe it: “Singular, strange, poetic, feverish”. You are drawn to seek out images instead.
There were some lighter moments. His observation about Warburg’s “good neighbour” theory of how books should be arranged, that the book we are looking for is not necessarily the one we should read but the one next to it. The “slightly idiotic sympathy” he feels for Jonathan Safran Foer whose books are often placed next to his.
Charlotte is an intensely personal book so much so that reading it sometimes felt like intrusion into a private obsession.
I received an advance review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.
In three words: Biographical, distinctive, immersive
About the Author
. His novels have appeared in over forty languages, and in 2014 he was awarded the Prix Renaudot for his novel Charlotte.
Growing up in a home with few books and often absent parents, David Foenkinos read and wrote little during his childhood. At 16, he required emergency surgery as a result of a rare pleural infection and spent several months recuperating in hospital, where he began to devour books, learning to paint and play the guitar. From this experience, he says, he kept a drive for life, a force that he wanted to convey through his books.
He studied literature at the Sorbonne and music in a jazz school, eventually becoming a guitar teacher. In the evenings, he was a waiter in a restaurant. After unsuccessfully trying to set up a music group, he turned his hand to writing.
After a handful of failed manuscripts, he found his style, and his first novel Inversion de l’idiotie: de l’influence de deux Polonais (Inversion of idiocy: influenced by two Poles), though refused by many other publishers, was published by Gallimard in 2002; the book earned him the François-Mauriac literary prize, awarded by the Académie Française.
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