Novels in Three Lines

Wonderful fun. Gallows humor, extremely dry. Arid. Feneon published these faits-divers in the newspaper Le Matin in 1906. 1,066 of the original 1,220 (Sante omits 154 of them for being too obscure ... though reading the ones that remain, I'd love to see the ones that were rejected ... what counts as "obscurity" with these?) mordant, often violent bits of French life are reprinted in this slim NYRB volume. Two nits: there's nothing regarding the images reproduced throughout (some are pages of newsprint but most seem to be woodcuts by -- I guess, given the initials 'FV' on them -- Felix Vallotton) and the repeating header on the right-hand pages reads "Novels in The Three Lines" ... where was your copy-editor, NYRB Classics?

Marvelous, weird, grim, blackly funny. Originally published in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906 as "Faits-divers," (literally, "diverse facts"), Feneon constructed these precursors to flash [non]fiction based on newswire and other provincial newspaper reports. Murder. Suicide. Rape. Domestic abuse - marital, adulterous, child sexual. Road accidents. Festival queens. Rabid dogs. Local politics. Disputes over crucifixes in classrooms. And who knew the French carried so many guns?! Each drama compressed into three lines of type, which managed to include the requisites of who, where, how, and why, and frequently a single word of dry comment. Read them as though they were haiku, in no particular order (only very rarely does a single show more event get more than one, though there are multiple thefts of telegraph cables mentioned).

Among my favorites: "In the vicinity of Noisy-sur-Ecole, M. Louis Delillieau, seventy, dropped dead of sunstroke. Quickly his dog Fido ate his head." and "Two mayors in the Somme were determined to restore to classroom walls the image of divine torture. The prefect suspended those mayors."

Feneon was an eccentric, writing and editing prolifically, the founder of important arts journals. But when offered the opportunity to publish a book, he announced "I aspire only to silence." The over a thousand "faits-divers" were printed anonymously, but his wife and his mistress carefully clipped and saved them. Luc Sante has captured their dry brevity with wit in translation, but I often found myself wanting to see them in the original French (what would the French idiom be for "fished out of the [name your choice of river here]," anyway? Sante's introduction is useful for understanding some of the allusions and social background of these tiny, lurid glimpses into French society of 1906. Fun for francophiles - and illustrated by several of Felix Vallotton's appropriately black and menacing woodcuts. show less

A collection of roughly 1000 little faits-divers (brief column-filling news stories) which Félix Fénéon contributed to a Parisian newspaper in 1906. Each of them took up a maximum of three lines of news print, hence the book's title. When Fénéon was on top form, these glimpses of life's tragedies and unusual occurrences can be mordantly funny and occasionally even beautiful. For the most part, though, this litany of strikes, suicides, child abuse, domestic violence, road accidents, train crashes, and religious disputes, takes on a kind of banal same-ishness. A more judicious selection would probably have worked better.

The entries take on a certain sameness as the book progresses. They are, nonetheless, interesting and well-crafted. I was surprised at how frequently people were run over by trams, streetcars and early automobiles in 1906 France.

Digesting an entire story and reproducing it in three lines is an art form. To have had it your daily paper was a privilege denied to all of us. Feneon could make the most mundane news item into a fascinating gem. He could communicate angles with extraordinarily efficient use of words. He was the Al Hirschfeld of news. Like Hirschfeld, Feneon's news items are tinged with humor:

Brandy he thought. Actually it was carbolic acid.
Thus Philibert Faroux, of Noroy, Oise, outlived
his spree by a mere two hours.

If you read this book while imagining the nationwide roundup page in USA Today, you will mourn the death of creativity. Journalism today is so dry and careful, so politically correct, as to be completely disposable and avoidable. Try this show more item, one of series describing the ongoing battle to get crucifixes out of classrooms in 1906:

Two mayors in the Somme were determined
to restore to classroom walls the image
of divine torture. The prefect suspended
those mayors.

And let me leave you with one last gem that could also never appear in an American paper today:

The name of a man arrested in Blainville
as a spy: Tourdias. His age: 24. His
profession: traveling salesman of bandages
and medicine.

Truly a novel, an elevator pitch for a Hollywood thriller. Leaves you asking questions, like nothing in the papers today. And that's the whole point, isn't it? Leave them asking for more! show less

Fénéon was a brilliant French intellectual, an anarchist activist, a writer of considerable talent but no reputation to speak of, and a promoter of French painters, writers, and liberal thinkers. In 1906, Fénéon was employed by the French daily Le Matin. During that year, he wrote 1,220 fait-divers—"sundry events," short news items that occupied a very few newspaper columns. Fénéon's fait-divers were uniquely and cleverly written, coming to be known as "novels in three lines." This collection of all but 154 of his fait-divers is pure fun and a bit of literary genius.

The introduction/life of Fénéon was interesting -- a guy in turn-of-the-century France who was popular in art (helped discover Georges Seurat), publishing (employed Debussy as his music critic in a magazine he published), & the salon circles, as well as being an anarchist.

This "novel" (from the introduction):

"... there are 1,220 of them in all; a mere 154 have been omitted here because their significance has fallen into obscurity -- were all published in 1906 in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin. Newspapers in many countries apart from the United States run columns of such brief stories, which in French are called faits-divers ("sundry events"; "fillers" are nearly but not quite the same -- there is no simple English equivalent).

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They cover the same subjects as the rest of the paper -- crime, politics, ceremony, catastrophe -- but their individual narratives are compressed into a single frame, like photographs."

The past couple of days, I have been listening to Last Podcast on the Left, including their multi-part series on Jack the Ripper. While not exactly the same time, nor in the same city, I was struck between the various similarities between the Whitechapel they describe & the Paris you see through these "filler" items, namely life is pretty tough (for all ages & classes) in these highly-populated areas.

Many of the topics of these faits-divers are suicide, murder, injury, drowning, being run-over or hit by horses/carts/trains/trams/vehicles, work strikes, poverty, depression, hunger, jealous lovers (including acid attacks), drinking, & (apparently big at the time) the argument between church & state with some headmasters refusing to remove religion from the schools even though the government was telling them to do so. Basically, a lot of the human condition covered in just a sentence or three.

(More than once, suicide was by two bullets & my question is, is that common? Someone can easily shoot themselves twice?)

Some are wittily written & some are amusing, but overall as a whole, I found it pretty sad. So much of the suffering of the human condition is on display here. It is an interesting snapshot of news in/around Paris in 1906. show less