Blue Self-Portrait

A French woman haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer who is obsessed with Arnold Schoenberg''s portrait, flies home with her lively sister and a volume of Adorno''s letters to Thomas Mann. While the impossible heroine unpicks her social failures the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg''s passionate, chilling blue. A novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin''s cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore.