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Charlotte
Cover of Charlotte
Charlotte
A Novel
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A prize-winning novel based on the life of Charlotte Salomon: a "searing portrait of a brilliant artist" who persisted despite the horrors of WWII (Kirkus).
Obsessed with art, and with living, Charlotte Salomon attended school in Germany until she was forced to flee. In France, Charlotte was interned in work camp which she narrowly escaped. She then spent the next two years in almost total solitude, creating a series of artworks—images, words, even musical scores—that tell her life story.
Before Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six, she entrusted her life's work to a friend, who kept it safe until peacetime. In Charlotte, David Foenkinos—with passion, life, humor, and intelligent observation—has written his own utterly original tribute to Charlotte Salomon's tragic life and transcendent art. First published to critical acclaim in France, Foenkinos's hauntingly redemptive novel is masterfully translated by Sam Taylor.
Winner of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens
A prize-winning novel based on the life of Charlotte Salomon: a "searing portrait of a brilliant artist" who persisted despite the horrors of WWII (Kirkus).
Obsessed with art, and with living, Charlotte Salomon attended school in Germany until she was forced to flee. In France, Charlotte was interned in work camp which she narrowly escaped. She then spent the next two years in almost total solitude, creating a series of artworks—images, words, even musical scores—that tell her life story.
Before Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six, she entrusted her life's work to a friend, who kept it safe until peacetime. In Charlotte, David Foenkinos—with passion, life, humor, and intelligent observation—has written his own utterly original tribute to Charlotte Salomon's tragic life and transcendent art. First published to critical acclaim in France, Foenkinos's hauntingly redemptive novel is masterfully translated by Sam Taylor.
Winner of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens
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About the Author-
  • David Foenkinos is an award-winning French novelist and screenwriter. Charlotte, inspired by the life of Charlotte Salomon, won the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens; it has sold more than half a million copies in France and been translated into nineteen languages. Sam Taylor previously translated HHhH, by Laurent Binet, and is the author of the novels The Island at the End of the World, The Amnesiac and The Republic of Trees. He lives in France and the United States. Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin, 1917. Unknown in her lifetime, she was one of Germany's great modern artists. Her greatest achievement was Life? or Theatre? A Song-play - an autobiographical series of 769 works, which she painted over two years in the South of France while in hiding from the Nazis. It has gone on to inspire films, plays and an opera. Salomon died in Auschwitz in 1943, gassed along with her unborn child shortly after her arrival.
Reviews-
  • Kirkus

    March 15, 2016
    Charlotte Salomon, a real-life German Jewish artist, created a small but radiant body of work before dying in the Holocaust. Salomon was 26 when she died at Auschwitz. The young artist had recently completed a massive autobiographical project that combined writing and musical notation with vivid, original paintings. That project, which she titled Life? or Theatre?, survived the war, was exhibited all over the world, and is still referred to today. Foenkinos draws on Life? or Theatre? in his tribute to Salomon, a kind of imagined biography--he calls it a novel--which also describes his own preoccupation with Salomon's art and life. Foenkinos, a French screenwriter and author of 13 novels (Delicacy, 2012, etc.), has a wry humor, a keen intelligence, and a wide frame of reference. This is a smart book, as passionate as it is tragic. The author's language is considered and precise, as is the arrangement of white space on each page. Foenkinos ends a line every time he ends a sentence and begins a new line with every new sentence. This system creates a hushed and poignant atmosphere. Still, his work doesn't quite hang together. Strangely, he dwells least on what most drew him to Salomon: her art. He relies on glowing but vague accolades about her work ("incredibly moving," "startlingly powerful") without going into any greater depth. The question you're left with is a simple one but stark: why tell Salomon's story when she already told her own? Foenkinos hasn't written a biography, but he hasn't written a novel, either. He's retold Salomon's life in his own style. His is an unsettling ventriloquism. It's as if he's extracted Salomon's voice and inserted his own in the space where it was. A searing portrait of a brilliant artist that doesn't reveal anything new about its subject.

    COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from March 15, 2016

    This best-selling French novel has many different guises. It is the true story of German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. At the time of her death in 1943, she was 26 and pregnant. It is also an account of the author's obsession with Charlotte and her art, a reflection on Charlotte's masterpiece Life? or Theatre?, which survived her to become a highly acclaimed art exhibit and a published book. In the form of a prose poem, the novel tells Charlotte's experience, illuminating her life as if it were happening in the moment. VERDICT Winner of the French Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens, this work demonstrates how art can help a person rise above one's circumstances. Despite Nazi persecution, despite coming from a family with a history of mental illness and suicides, Charlotte Salomon persisted, creating an epic biographical output of more than 750 paintings that now resides in the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum.--Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

    Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    Starred review from May 1, 2016
    French novelist Foenkinos (Delicacy, 2011) struggled to find a way to write about the anguished life and brilliantly inventive and haunting lifework of German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (191743). The result is a fact-embracing novel that resembles poetry with one reverberating sentence stacked over another. Within this crystalline form pulses every shade of emotion, from elation and amusement to longing and sorrow, the surrounding white space emblematic of all that was taken from this young genius. As a child in Berlin, Charlotte is never told that her mother's death was a suicide, as was that of the aunt she was named after, along with a staggering number of other relatives, with more to come. With the Nazis in power, neither Charlotte nor her opera-star stepmother is free to pursue her art. As threats intensify, Charlotte, secretly in love with her stepmother's voice teacher, is sent to the French Riviera, where her grandparents found sanctuary with a wealthy American widow. There Charlotte paints feverishly, creating her passionate and revealing autobiographical opus, Life? or Theater?, a combination of handwritten texts and more than 700 indelible paintings. A masterpiece that, like the writings of Anne Frank and Irene Nemirovsky, survived after Charlotte, 26 years old and pregnant, was killed at Auschwitz. Foenkinos' unique homage is exquisitely empathetic and stunningly tragic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal (Starred Review) In the form of a prose poem, the novel tells Charlotte's experience, illuminating her life as if it were happening in the moment...[Charlotte] demonstrates how art can help a person rise above one's circumstances.
  • Booklist (starred review) [A] novel that resembles poetry with one reverberating sentence stacked over another. Within this crystalline form pulses every shade of emotion, from elation and amusement to longing and sorrow, the surrounding white space emblematic of all that was taken from this young genius. Foenkinos' unique homage is exquisitely empathetic and stunningly tragic.
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Charlotte
Charlotte
A Novel
David Foenkinos
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