Alternate and early drafts from Joanna Neborsky’s wonderful new book Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon:
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (cover)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
A
Text: “The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Menard, snail collector.”
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
B
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
A
Text: “A temptress was luring Loret toward a den of passion when four brutes in slippers stripped him of everything.”
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
B
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
A
Text: “Hanging onto the door, a traveler a tad overweight caused his carriage to topple, in Menilmontant, and fractured his skull.”
Joanna Neborsky, Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, 2010 (unused illustration)
B
In 2007, NYRB Classics published Luc Sante’s translation of Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon. Joanna Neborsky, who illustrated twenty-eight of these deadpan fait-divers for her book, describes them perfectly:
“Death by absinthe, kerosene, and sneeze: French men and women meet ample varieties of doom in Fénéon‘s nouvelles en trois lignes, 1,220 brief, grisly news items the author–a Parisian editor, critic, and anarchist–wrote in 1906 for the newspaper Le Matin.”
And here’s Luc Sante, from his intro to the NYRB book:
Fénéon‘s three-line news items, considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism…. They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.
Read an interview with Joanna at the Daily Heller.
All of the images kindly provided by the illustrator.
