Charlotte - David Foenkinos (tr. Sam Taylor)

Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish painter who died in Auschwitz in 1943 at 26 years of age, leaving behind 800 gouache paintings titled "Life? Or Theatre? A Play With Music." She managed to hand her paintings to a local physician just before being deported; now, many of these are stored at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam and can be viewed online here: https://charlotte.jck.nl/. This deeply personal project helped the young woman come to terms with the tragic events in her life. The work she left behind has inspired many artists, filmmakers and writers. In this book, David Foenkinos brings her story to life, combining elements of biography, fiction and art. It is a moving and thought-provoking novel that pays tribute to an extraordinary artist and her indomitable spirit.

Charlotte Salomon is born into a family stricken by suicide and a country at war - but there is something exceptional about her. She has a gift, a talent for painting. And she has a great love, for a brilliant, eccentric musician.

But just as she is coming in to her own as an artist, death is coming to control her country. The Nazis have come to power and, a Jew in Berlin, her life is narrowing - she is kept from her art, torn from her love and her family, chased from her country. And still she is not safe, not from the madness that has hunted her family, or the one gripping Europe …

Charlotte is a heart-breaking true story - inspiring, unflinching, awful, hopeful - of a life filled with curiosity, animated by genius and cut short by hatred. A beautifully, lucidly told memorial, it has become an international sensation.

“I am deeply, deeply affected by this sad, beautiful, indignant, wrenching, important book … It is an artistic privilege and (I think) almost a moral duty that you all read this”
Sarah Perry, Author Of The Essex Serpent

“Foenkinos writes arrestingly about Charlotte, masterfully imagining her interior life … So much space on the page visually transforms each paragraph into a stanza, while lending the words a solemn weight and power … [A] beautiful, wretched story”
guardian

“An astonishing novel. Every line has something profound to say about love and loss, hope and fear, time and memory, and the enduring power of art”
Andrew Michael Hurley, Author Of The Loney

“From its striking first sentence there is no turning away … A far superior tribute to any commemorative plaque”
Sara Baume
irish Times

“Each sentence begins on a new line, giving it the deceptive look of a long poem. The success of this approach, loyally managed by Sam Taylor in his translation, is the make Charlotte read as a series of tricker-tape bulletins, delivered in breathless fits and starts”
london Review Of Books

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