Erik Satie Three Piece Suite - Ian Penman

Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque 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.

‘A glorious celebration of this most elusive and ambiguous of early 20th-century composers…. A delight to read.’
— John Banville, Observer

‘Entertaining and enriching … this impressionistic work of criticism is nimble, dwelling in or creating poignant moods. I came away [with] a strong feel for [Satie’s] sensibility, and now find myself revisiting his music obsessively.’
— Jonathan McAloon, Financial Times

‘Ian Penman resists the urge to categorize Satie neatly, avoiding the reductive tendencies that often plague biographies. Satie’s life was full of contradictions … Penman does not impose an all-encompassing thesis. He avoids reading Satie’s life through the often overstated lenses of his sexuality and alcoholism. Instead, he embraces Satie’s life as a series of bizarre episodes, some of which are indistinguishable from dreams, rather than as a composite whole…. [Satie] was also radically ahead of his time. Surrealism, conceptual art and ambient music all owe the Honfleur native a great debt…. Penman treasures his entire oeuvre for embracing the “forgotten realm of quiet moments”. In a world that rarely slows down and in which silence seldom lingers, Satie’s music remains an antidote, an invitation to embrace repetition and emptiness.’
— Colm McKenna, Irish Times

‘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 of The Other Paris

‘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 of Affinities

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, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Harper’s 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.

Fitzcarraldo, 2025
English
Softcover, 224 pages
125mm x 197mm