Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

(Paperback)

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Description

Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle poque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman's masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death.

Reviews

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'Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat, and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century's worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.'

- Lucy Sante, author ofThe Other Paris

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'Ian Penman - critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of sentences like they're snakes - is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.'

- Brian Dillon, author ofAffinities

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'This is the only book I have read twice this year. Truly it is thousands of mirrors in terms of the thoughts, images and references running through this reflective and wonderfully interior work. The world of European cinema, especially Fassbinder's film seen through Ian Penman's eyes, has transported me to a tantalizing place called post-war Europe. The book brings me back to my youth and my film school years in the east and west, and it reminds me of how powerful images have shaped our very understanding of love and life.'

- Xialuo Guo, chair of the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature (praise for Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors)

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'[Fassbinder]Thousands of Mirrorsis not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It's much more interesting than that - a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman's younger self.... It's a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.'

-Anthony Quinn,Observer (praise for Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors)

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Author Bio

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena,Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). His first original book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2024.