Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père (2011)

Tuer le père (literally 'Killing the Father') is Amélie Nothomb's latest work, although Barbe-Bleue ('Bluebeard' as in the Charles Perrault story) will appear on 22 August: she turns one out a year in time for the rentrée, and has been doing so for twenty years. I've read all her books so far, and have been impressed (to varying degrees of course) with each one.

This novella has a framing device: the first and last brief scene (both on the same occasion in 2010) take place at L'Illégal Magic Club at Le Shywawa in Paris, and these are related by an observer called Amélie Nothomb. She sees everyone enjoying themselves apart from a 30-year-old man winning at poker, and everyone watching him apart from a 50-year-old man whose intention seem to be to disturb the younger man. On enquiring, she learns that the younger man is Joe Whip, and the other Norman Terence. And then the flashback starts.

The action begins in 1994 in Reno, Nevada, where Joe's mother sells bicycles. Joe, who doesn't like his mother's new boyfriend, is thrown out because she doesn't want to lose her new man.

Joe is only 14 and must find his own way in life with the small amount of money his mother sends him every month. But Joe's gift is magic and he can do amazing card tricks, so has no difficulty making money. He learns the tricks through videos, but a stranger tells him he needs a teacher. So Joe gets to live with the professional magician Norman Terence and his girlfriend Christina, who is a fire dancer from hippie parents whose ways she has partly rejected.

When Joe becomes madly in love with Christina he hides it from the couple, but saves his virginity for when he is eighteen, when Norman and Christina will allow him to go to the Burning Man festival, Black Rock, Nevada. Once there, Norman and Christina take LSD but Joe secretly hides his blotting paper in his jeans, and by pretending to feel sick at a night club he manages to be alone with Christina and have sex with her. Norman believes that this is Joe's way of killing the father he believes he had been.

After Burning Man Joe chooses, amicably, to leave his substitute parents to be a croupier in Las Vegas, but much to their chagrin he completely severs ties with them. It's only the day after Joe's twentieth birthday in 2000 that Norman will hear any more of Joe, who is accused of a huge swindle at the casino. That there is not sufficient evidence to convict him is believable, as is his having to pay the money back to avoid death by concrete, but it's the conversation Joe has with Norman near the end of the book that is too much to believe.

What devastates Norman is that Joe refuses to see him as a father, because the man he looks upon as his father is the stranger (mentioned above) who devised the poker scam, which was arranged five years in advance, and Joe hasn't seen the man since, apart from across the card table when the swindle took place. And it is this 'father' who went flying back to Belgium with the fortune that Joe made for him, leaving Joe a relatively paltry $40,000 tip (and incidentally leaving him to refund the full $4,000,000 to his boss). What reason could Joe possibly have for keeping this agreement after five years, and how could he have seen, and indeed still see, this stanger as a father? Well, of course, he's insane. Sorry, but this is just too easy an escape.

Finally, the reader is back at L'Illégal Magic Club, now with the character Amélie Nothomb fully acquainted with the circumstances about Joe and Norman, who has been following his 'son' wherever he goes for eight years, and will continue to do so until he gets 'justice': recognition as a father. Yes, he's gone mad too.

This book has themes common to many other books by Nothomb: obsession, psychedelic drugs, madness, etc. It didn't feel the same though, and I was drawn back to a sentence a few pages near the end: Maintenant, je découvre à quel point tout ceci était dénué de signification: 'Now I understand to what extent all this was stripped of meaning'. Quite. Normally the reader expects a twist with Nothomb, but this just seems twisted: this reader feels short-changed, although I only borrowed the book from the library.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Delphine de Vigan: Les Heures souterraines (2009)

'At thirty she survived the death of her husband.

She's now forty and a bastard in a three-piece suit is systematically destroying her.'

That neatly sums up most of Les Heures souterraines, in which the widow Mathilde — whose husband died ten years earlier when their car hit a tree as they were on their way to a hotel in Honfleur — is losing both her job and her existential integrity. In a novel that reminds us of Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling) — which of course is a reference to existentialist Kierkegaard's book — Mathilde, a victim of pathological revenge, is slowly stripped of the duties of her €3000-a-month post, reduced to a tiny room nicknamed 'the shed', or 'the shithouse' because it's next door to the sounds and smells of the men's room, and with no access to the firm's intranet or even any work to do.

Furthermore, when toward the end she tries to communicate with the psychotic Jacques Pelletier (whose assistant she has officially been but who for weeks has not spoken to her), her completely reasonable and calmly stated complaint about her catch-22 situation is distorted by her torturer into one of many gross insults that she simply hasn't made.

Perhaps inevitably, she resigns: insanity would probably have been the only alternative. Ignoring the fact that others in Mathilde's office shun her too — after all, they are only doing so out of fear of Pelletier — the source of the protagonist's alienation only stems from one source, and not from several sources as in Nothomb's novel and Kafka's The Trial. Shouldn't the company be aware that he has a behaviorial problem? To mention just a few indications of this:

He complains that his hotel carpet is dirty, whereas the vacuum cleaner has only been swept against the pile; he sends back his plate in a restaurant because the pattern on it is too phallic for him; he brings the receptionist up to his room in the middle of the night because he can't, among the 120 available channels, find CNN; he can't stand waiting in traffic jams so starts yelling insults at his GPS. The list doesn't end there by any means.

But I've left out a major (or in a sense very minor) theme in the novel: the relationship between Mathilde and Thibault.

Mathilde travels to work in Le Vert de Maisons via the métro and the RER, and the narrator underlines her daily acquaintance with this underworld:

'She knew by heart the corridors, the escalators, the short cuts, this subterranean world woven like a web into the depths of the town.'

Thibault both travels and works on the surface of Paris, being a doctor driving to 'emergency' situations, although many of them aren't emergencies, and he knows the streets of Paris and the inhabitants' assumed and real illnesses as well as Mathilde knows the alienation of the underground. Ten years after the death of her husband, Mathilde's three children can't fill the hole in her life, and nor can she the hole in theirs, and surely paying that 'voyante' over in the 16th arrondissement €150 euros just to be told her life will change on 20 May was a sheer waste of money?

Apart from the backstories, the action in Les Heures souterraines takes place on 20 May, when Matilde resigns after eight years, and when Thibault (who has finished with a woman he loves but who is incapable of loving him) is forced by traffic conditions to abandon his car for the night and take the métro.

They are now aware of each other, and both crave heterosexual warmth. Across strapotins, Thibault studies Mathilde and sees what he thinks is a similar mind, and wants to talk to her. But he doesn't say a word. She disappears into her alienated world, and he into his.

Delphine de Vigan is to be congratulated for giving this really absorbing psychological study a much more realistic (and therefore extremely uncommercial) ending than it could have had.

Links to my other Delphine de Vigan posts:
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Delphine de Vigan: No et moi

Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim
Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons

Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres (2002)

In English this is The Book of Proper Names, but much is missed in the translation of this title.

At the age of nineteen Lucette and Fabien marry, although they have no idea what they're going to do with their lives. When she's eight months pregnant, Lucette fires bullets into the sleeping Fabien's head because she wants to protect her child from a commonplace name – Tanguy or Joëlle – that Fabien has decided on. In prison, after ensuring her baby daughter is baptised Plectrude, she hangs herself with a rope of torn prison sheets.

Lucette's older sister Clémence and her husband Denis then adopt the baby. Plectrude is loved by the whole family, which includes the slightly older daughters Nicole and Béatrice, who devour food and grow, whereas Plectrude eats little, and only her eyes grow. And it is her eyes that cause her to be rejected from nursery school, because they frighten everyone, almost as if she were a witch. She has no problems when she takes ballet lessons, though, as she is brilliant and loved by all.

When Plectrude begins her compulsory schooling, she hates it, and is only saved by Roselyne, a friend from ballet lessons. Later, a boy called Mathieu Saladin joins the class, and although Mathieu and Plectrude are in love with each other, they never exactly have the occasion to express it.

Plectrude is determined to make a career as a dancer, so goes to the Opéra de Paris boarding school, where there are echoes of the concentration camp (cf. Les saboteurs amoureux and Acide sulfurique), where she becomes anorexic, stops taking calcium, and eventually puts an end to any possible career as a dancer by breaking a leg.

Plectrude joins a theater group, but when she starts only reading Ionesco things become really absurd: like her mother, she gets pregnant (but through a casual relationship) and decides to commit suicide (but by jumping from the Pont-Neuf), although she is saved by the magical appearance of Mattieu Saladin, who shows her that there is life after attempting to get your leg over the Pont-Neuf.

The reader is spared a description of the years of bliss that Plectrude (now known as the singer Robert (not RoBERT)) shares with the musician Mathieu, but a character called Amélie Nothomb becomes a kind of sister to her, although she talks too much and must be dealt with, so the problem Robert and Mathieu have is 'Amélie, or How to Get Rid of It', which of corpse (sorry – couldn't resist it) is the central problem that Amédée and Madeleine have in Ionesco's 1954 play Amédée ou comment s'en débarrasser (Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It), which, as the narrator points out, is just one syllable different.

The book may end there, but not the background to the novel, which adds a fascinating dimension to it: the Robert dictionary books are an obvious link to the title, but more importantly the novel is a fictionalized biography of Myriam Roulet, better known as the singer RoBERT, who was a very close friend (like a sister) of Amélie Nothomb's for a number of years. RoBERT is a singer of songs often concerned – like a number of Nothomb's novels – with childhood and death (the latter actual or symbolic), with a mixture of the magical and the tragic. RoBERT is married to the musician Mathieu Saladin, and she (or rather Roulet) too began a classical dancing career that ended with leg trouble, and... I don't know. Did RoBERT's mother kill her father when she was pregnant with her? As RoBERT says (these being her only words in English) in an eccentric (how could it not be?) interview: 'That is the question'. Nothomb told RoBERT that she was pregnant with her, which is less bizarre than it sounds as 'pregnancy' is far from an unusual sensation authors experience when writing books. RoBERT also says that Nothomb took truths and mixed them around in the novel, partly to protect RoBERT. The four-minute interview is here.

RoBERT's album Celle qui tue (best translated as 'The Woman Who Kills') contains six tracks written by Nothomb, with the music by Mathieu Saladin: 'A la guerre comme à la guerre', 'Le Chant des sirènes', 'Nitroglycérine', 'Sorcière', 'Celle qui tue,' 'Requiem pour une soeur perdue'. It was released a few months after the novel, and it is rewarding to view both novel and album side by side: Nothomb (presumably only in certain respects) considers music to be a far more superior medium than literature, but is incapable of making music herself.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie (2010)

Perhaps only four or five of Amélie Nothomb's novels can be classed as what the French term 'autofiction', but all of them contain elements of her life - for instance, she really did, as mentioned in Une forme de vie (translated as Life Form), write this article in The New York Times 2 April 2009, in which she praises Barack Obama but criticizes Nicolas Sarkozy. It is also well known that she has no internet connection, not even a computer, and that she writes - in longhand - to many people who write to her.

Amélie Nothomb's Une forme de vie is partly epistolary, the narrator sharing her name with the author as well as one of the two letter writers, the other letter writer being Melvin Mapple, a soldier in Iraq.

The character Amélie Nothomb is a writer, and Melvin Mapple begins a correspondence with her after reading all her books. Melvin is 39 years old, and had spent some time as a tramp before joining the army, which he did solely because he was sick of being hungry, and in the army he can eat as much as he pleases. His surname reminds us of the sugary maple syrup that millions of Americans pour on their daily breakfast waffles.

It is a fact that the number of military personnel diagnosed as overweight or obese has doubled since 2003, and the fictional Melvin is an extreme representative of one of these people. He believes food is a stronger drug than opium was in Nam, and finds overeating is a form of relief from the hell of war.

But he is not without self-disgust, and as a coping mechanism calls his obesity Scheherazade, imagining the young woman of One Thousand and One Nights, after the horrors of the day, lying on his impotent body and telling him soothing stories at night. But ashamed as he is of his unspeakably ugly body, he can't stop eating: sometimes, he imagines Scheherazade is one of the civilians he has killed, and it would be killing her a second time if he lost weight.

Plus, he sees his and other soldiers' obesity as a kind of sabotage, causing the government to spend enormous amounts of money on food, special outsize clothing, medical expenses, etc: yes, this novel is of course (if only in part) a criticism of the war on Iraq.

Melvin begins to fascinate her. For some reason, the character Amélie initially thinks that Melvin comes from the Mid-West, although he comes from Baltimore, Maryland, which - the narrator reminds us - is where the 'pope of Bad Taste' John Waters comes from, and where he sets all his movies. The character Amélie has previously informed us that someone sent her a shit-covered copy of one of her novels in the mail, and she is without doubt thinking here of The Marbles sending Divine a box containing a birthday card and a turd in Water's Pink Flamingos (1972), even of Divine eating dog droppings on the sidewalk toward the end of the movie.

(One movie that the author (and/or narrator) chooses not to mention - perhaps because too obvious - is Marco Ferreri's La grande bouffe, in which four characters decide to commit suicide by overeating.)

On Amélie's's prompting, Marvin decides to turn his body into an art form and take regular photos of it. When she tells him that a gallery(-cum-café) wants a recent photo of him, he sends Amélie a grotesque naked shot, his genitals hidden by layers of fat. But when a photo of him in uniform is asked for, he runs for cover.

The reason is because, well, he's a liar and has never been a soldier: they rejected him because of his obesity.

But it's when the reader finishes the book and looks at the cover and the title that he or she starts to wonder who the really mad person is. And if the title relates to both of the characters.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique (2005)

Acide sulfurique is probably the strongest social criticism Amélie Nothomb has so far made, and it is significant - bearing in mind that she is so suspicious of the internet that she doesn't even have a connection - that this criticism should involve modern technology.

The date is uncertain, but definitely the future, and probably the near future, when reality TV has almost exhausted any new permutation to stimulate viewing figures. Until, that is, television executives, with the complicity of the government, invent Concentration, the program that will make viewing figures hit the ceiling: in this, they kidnap people off the street to play out the role of victims of Nazi-style concentration camps. But there's a vital extra factor involved: the television studios are real concentration camps, and the victims are starved and beaten by paid fascist guards, and sent to their death.

There are similar themes in this book to Nothomb's others: the juxtaposition of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, monsters and saints; the (mentioned or unmentioned) metafictional references - Sartre's Huis clos yet again, but also Maupassant's Boule de suif; and there are prolonged crucial dialogs between the two main characters.

We are also implicitly reminded - probably via Michel Foucault, or George Orwell's telescreen - of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, the ever-present eye in the totalitarian world.

In Acide sulfurique - for the viewer - Kapo Zdena is the most hated pyschopathic employee, and Pannonique (now known as 'CKZ 114') the most loved prisoner. We sense that Pannonique will soon meet her death, but it is made perfectly clear who the real murderers are: not the television executives, not the government, but the ordinary viewers, the ghouls who perpetuate this system by continuing to watch.

Slowly, Kapo Zdena - who doesn't even possess a TV - comes to share the audience's sympathies and loves the beautiful CKZ 114, slipping her chocolate, merely pretending to beat her, but it's not enough for Pannonique, as the same rules should be applied to all the prisoners, and she will not submit to the sexual blackmail of Kapo Zdena under any circumstances.

And eventually, Pannonique's intelligent but hair-raisingly risky tactics pay off and Kapo Zdena is in her magnetic power, which is strong enough to change the nature of reality. Or at least reality TV. By sheer bluff - forget the sulphuric acid.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Attentat (1997)

Attentat is yet another Amélie Nothomb story which is very different from what she's done before, although several motifs remain from her other works – the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness, virginity, imprisonment (in this case the prison of the narrator's body), obsession to the point of madness, and a violent climax, etc.

Epiphane Otos is a grotesque-looking man in his twenties, and groteseque here means that even Cyrano de Bergerac (about whom there is a reference because of the similarities) is an Adonis in comparison, and the reader suspects that even John Merrick, the Elephant Man's who's also mentioned, would come across favorably at the side of Epiphane.

It is by chance that Epiphane meets Ethel, a really beautiful young woman in the film industry who is distressed by the treatment Epiphane receives simply because he's unbelievably ugly, and a kind of brother-sister relationship develops between them that toward the end makes them virtually inseparable. But secretly, Epiphane – a very intelligent but somewhat misguided person – is madly in love with Ethel. At the age of 29 he is still a virgin, having ignored prostitutes, the only women his physical condition would normally have allowed him access to.

But – as it's now necessary for him to work after he's exhausted his inheritance money – he improbably finds a job (and fame) by joining beautiful models on the catwalk: set off against his ugliness, the beauties shine more beautifully, etc. And the beautiful young women are queueing up to have sex with him – well, it's the difference! – but no, he is silently saving himself for Ethel, and maintains an ascetic stance.

So Epiphane is none too pleased when Ethel takes Xavier as a lover, a narcissistic beau with other obvious faults. But when Ethel decides to break with him and needs Epiphane for brotherly comfort, Epiphane has at that very time to judge a beauty competition in Japan. Ethel insists he go, and Epiphane says he'll maintain contact by fax.

On the flight, Epiphane writes pages and pages to be faxed to Ethel, continues them in the hotel, finally confesses his love in the last one, returns and discovers Ethel's back with Xavier and furious with Epiphane as he's not only arrogantly assumed the impossible – that he and Ethel can be a couple – but written her a fax so dazzlingly beautiful that no one else could ever in her life write her, so he'll have to leave for ever, but he kills her, and  internally preserves her memory in his solitary prison cell.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver (2009)

At the center of the brief novel Le voyage d'hiver (Winter Journey) is the relationship between Zoïle, Astrolabe, and Aliénor. Zoïle's occupation involves contacting people who have just moved house to discuss their energy 'needs', and he describes himself as 'vaguely' employed by the EDF (Électricité de France) and GDF (Gaz de France). He meets the young women Astrolabe and Aliénor in the course of a visit and is shocked that they have no heating in December and that their appartment roof is made of glass: they wear several layers of clothing and insist that they can afford no heating because buying the flat has taken up all their money. 

They are an odd couple: Astrolabe is beautiful but Aliénor has a harelip, foams at the mouth, eats anything put in front of her without knowing when to stop, and suffers from 'Pneux's disease', a 'benign' form of autism that is another invention of Nothomb's.  Zoïle assumes that Aliénor is an idiot,  but becomes increasingly preoccupied by Astrolabe. He knows from the beginning that the owner of the property is a certain A. Malèze, who is a novelist , so he starts to read her books and returns to the appartment to learn that Aliénor is in fact the author: her publishers treated her cruelly, so Astrolabe has chosen to be a kind of permanent literary agent-cum-nursemaid to her: Aliénor has to dictate her novels, and her illness is such that she doesn't care for personal hygiene, so Astrolabe even has to wash her.

Very quickly, Zoïle falls in love with Astrolabe, although she refuses to leave Aliénor out of her sight, and even their kisses take place under Aliénor's (re)searching gaze. Then he has an odd idea: they'll all take magic mushrooms. After this is done, he puts on the electronic music of Aphex Twin  (or Richard D. James) and they trip for eight hours. Aliénor just closes her eyes and absorbs her first psychedelic experience internally, while Zoïle and Astrolabe filter the experience through the physical world, seeing things far differently from Aliénor.

During the trip, Astobabe asks Zoile:

'Pourquoi cessons-nous de voir en grandissant?'. ('Why do we stop seeing when we grow up?'. )

Zoïle replies: 'Précisément parce que nous grandissons. Nous apprenons les dures lois de survie qui nous forcent à nous focaliser sur ce qui est utile. Nos yeux désapprennent la beauté. Grâce aux champignons, nous retrouvons nos perceptions de petit enfant.' ('Precisely because we grow up. We learn harsh survival laws that force us to focus on what's useful. Our eyes unlearn beauty. Thanks to mushrooms, we rediscover our perceptions as young children.')

I've already written a little about Nothomb's early childhood - the fact that physically she was a virtual cabbage for her first two and a half years following a breech birth, that she didn't speak a word and only made the slightest of movements in order to eat. Her books have suggested that life more or less ends at puberty, and adulthood is merely seen as a precursor to death. Le voyage d'hiver, though - incidentally the same title as Perec's short story mentioned below, and both authors of course are very much concerned with loss - appears to suggest a greater optimism about adulthood, although childhood is still a period in which 'real' life is played out. What's being said now is that hallucinogenic mushrooms, for instance, permit adults to revisit that childhood.

Zoïle remembers when he was tripping on the métro once, and was horrified by a man's tie: 'Comment avons-nous pu nous aveugler au point de trouver la laideur supportable? [...] Porter une telle cravatte, c'est une insulte, un attentat, un acte de mépris, ce comportement respire la haine, voila, ce type me hait, il hait le genre humain.' (How has it been possible for us to blind ourselves to the point of making ugliness bearable? [..] To wear such a tie is an insult, an attack, an act of contempt, this behavior stinks of hatred - that's it - this guy hates me, he hates humankind.')

The lucidity of tripping makes Zoïle arrive at a kind of Sartrean conclusion: 'l'enfer, ce n'est même pas l'autre entier: sa cravatte suffit.' ('hell is not even just the whole other person: his tie's enough'.)

However hell is other people for Zoïle, and he reads Astrolabe's stone(d) reaction to his sexual overtures as rejection. Astrolabe tells him that Gustave Eiffel designed the Eiffel Tower in the shape of an 'A' because of his consuming love for a young woman called, er, Amélie, so she inadvertently provides this perceived rejected lover with his apocalyptic plan.

Zoïle will go though airport security, buy a dutyfree bottle of champagne, pour it down the pan, smash it to leave him holding the jagged neck, with which he will slit the throats of the pilots, take control of the plane, and direct it straight at the Eiffel Tower.

And Le voyage d'hiver - unlike Perec's title - seems appropriate. The whole book is set in winter, there's a hallucinogenic trip and a planned airplane hi-jack, and Schubert's Le voyage d'hiver is what Zoïle will be thinking of - as a completely irrelevant thing to leave his mind almost blank - when he carries out his planned act of insanity.

The book is also very Nothomb: we have a claustrophobic largely one-room setting, ugliness and beauty, obsession, madness with (potential) violence, etc.

Amélie Nothomb? She never fails.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Alexandre Vialatte and Amélie Nothomb

In several of her novels, Amélie Nothomb mentions Alexandre ('I'm a notoriously unknown writer') Vialatte in passing. He was certainly unknown to me, but the fact that he was the man who introduced the French to Kafka and translated nine of his works makes good Nothombian sense. He also wrote a number of imaginative works, which according to editor Pascal Sigoda make the re-discovery of the 'kingdom of childhood' remarkably vivid. Yes, very Nothombian.

Links to my Alexandre Vialatte posts:
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Alexandre Vialatte and Amélie Nothomb
Alexandre Vialatte, 13e arrondissement
Alexandre Vialatte: Pas de H pour Natalie

Amélie Nothomb: Les combustibles (1994)

Les combustibles (1994) – which is entitled Human Rites in the English translation – is a play set in a freezing besieged town in an unnamed country, although we know that Nothomb partly had the siege of Sarajevo in mind when writing it. All of the action takes place in the room of an unnamed university professor aged about 50, and the only other two characters are the doctoral student Daniel – who is also the Professor's assistant – and Daniel's girlfriend-of-the-year Marina.

Les combustibles intentionally evokes Sartre's Huis Clos, which also has three characters in a claustrophobic atmosphere, and was published in occupied France in 1944. Nothomb strongly alludes to this when Marina mentions Georges Bernanos, and quotes from his Monsieur Ouine (1943): 'L'enfer, c'est le froid' – 'Hell is the cold', which immediately brings to mind Sartre's 'L'enfer, c'est les autres' – 'Hell is other people.' So far, so Nothombian.

The central issue is that the cold is so intense that the characters risk literally freezing to death unless heat is generated in some way: they have already burned the furniture apart from three chairs, and it is obvious that the Professor will have to burn his books in order to survive. But which books should be burned first: in other words, which are of the least literary value?

Apart from Bernanos, Marivaux is the only other non-invented author mentioned, and they are only mentioned in passing anyway, and the only non-invented books, also merely mentioned in passing, are The Iliad, The Odyssey, and – surprise, surprise – Fahrenheit 451 (which of course is the temperature at which paper burns).

This obviously means that the reader can have no views that conflict or interfere with the literary views expressed in Les combustibles, although it is clear that the Professor is an enormous hypocrite, but much more significantly – Nothomb is challenging the whole idea of a literary canon invented by a university élite.

Also, Les combustibles is as much a feminist statement as a literary one:

Marina, like Nina in Hygiène de l'assassin, is a spunky woman who shows herself an intellectual match for the Professor. Nothomb is ever eager to flex her feminist muscles. The Professor, of course, is yet another monster. I'm not certain if  Nothomb would have been aware of David Mamet's Oleanna – a play concerning the sexual harrassment of an undergraduate by her professor – before writing Les combustibles because the time frame between the two is quite narrow, but there are strong similarities between Oleanna and the second (that is, the middle) part of Les combustibles, albeit in a very different way.

Amélie Nothomb has been publishing books for 18 years. Where have I been?

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi (2001)

Cosmétique de l'ennemi begins in a flight departure lounge where a delay is announced, and Jérôme Angust settles down to read a book, but is pestered by a man - Textor Texel - who refuses to stop talking to him even though Angust has made it quite clear that he's annoying him.

There are some similarities between this novel and Hygiène de l'assassin, one obviously being Prétextat Tach's name, and there is also the mention of revolting eating habits: when younger, Texel enjoyed eating mashed cat food - or rather, he hated it, but an enemy inside him forced him to eat it - and Tach enjoys such food as sardine oil, throwing the sardines away. Like Tach, Texel is a monster, a kind of torturer who insists that he will not leave Angust alone. Both Tach and Texel were orphans from a young age (also like Adèle in Mercure, and even Blanche in Antéchrista calls herself an orphan because her parents ignore her): rootlessness is significant in the Nothombian world.

Cosmétique de l'ennemi also has similarities to Les catilinaires, where Berdardin tortures Emile and Juliette by holding them prisoner every day when he visits them, only Texel's method is the opposite: Bernardin conveys his existential torment by silence, whereas Texel conveys his to Angust by logorrhea. Angust even uses the same words of Texel as Emil does of Bernardin: 'emmerdeur' ('ball breaker') and 'tortionnaire' ('torturer').

But Texel is much more than a ball breaker, and even more than a torturer: twenty years earlier, he held Angust's wife overnight in a mausoleum in Montparnasse Cemetery and raped her, and stabbed her to death ten years later, exactly ten years before the book is set. He demands that Angust kill him, but the horrified Angust screams for the police to arrest Texel. When the police arrive, they think Angust has had too much to drink during the flight delay, and ignore Texel.

That's just where things begin to get really weird. Texel tells Angust that the police ignored him because he doesn't exist as such: in fact, he's no more than a very different part of Angust himself. He proceeds to tell Angust all he knows about him, which is a great deal: so is Texel trying to send Angust mad, or is he already mad?

Many things in this book will remind the reader of Nothomb's familiar concerns - rape, confinement (the departure lounge, the mausoleum, and above all the prison of one's own mind), psychological torture and freedom, ugliness and beauty, murder, eating disorders, suicide, the hell of other people, orphanhood, the influence of the theater, intertextual references, the monster within and without, etc - but I've not read a book of hers that is as gripping or as terrifying as this.

Whether the reader sees it as a straightforward battle of madness versus sanity, Kierkegaardian asthetics versus ethics, Freudian id versus the superego, Jansenism versus free will, or anything else, this is a very powerful psychological novel.

And it's even been translated in English - as The Enemy's Cosmetic.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
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Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince (2008)

On the back cover of Le fait du prince is a quotation from it: 'Il y a un instant, entre la quinzième et la seizième gorgée de champagne, où tout homme est un aristocrate': 'There is a moment, between the fifteenth and the sixteenth mouthful of champagne, when everyone is an aristocrat.' Nothomb should know, as she adores champagne. As do the odd couple in this novel, which is a kind of eccentric spy story set mainly in a villa in Versailles (where Nothomb has never been), and toward the end in Sweden (where she has never been either).

Baptiste Bordave receives a visit from an unknown man who says his car has broken down and, without a cell phone, he's been unable to make contact with anyone, so can he use Baptiste's phone? No problem there, but the stranger dies while making the call, and Baptiste doesn't know what to do. Nothomb – who by the way refuses to have an internet connection – is preoccupied by identity, and Baptiste decides to assume the identity of the dead man.

Baptiste takes the dead man's 1000 euros along with his wallet,  and decides to exchange lives with the dead Swedish Olaf Sildur, who lives in Versailles. This is made easier by the fact that the car – which is worth ten times more than Baptiste's – hasn't broken down at all, so he drives to the Versailles address where Olaf used to live. Letting himself in with Olaf's key, and not knowing if the Swede is married of whatever, Baptiste – after parking some distance away from the villa – just makes himself at home.

When Olaf's wife arrives she accepts him as part of the family and lavishes food and abundant champagne on him: she thinks he's a business colleague of Olaf's, and rather likes Baptiste (who calls himself (another) Olaf).

Olaf's wife is French, although she refuses to give her real name, preferring to accept Baptiste's chosen Sigrid. For a few days, Baptiste refuses to go outside while Sigrid shops expensively with Olaf's credit card, visits museums, and occasionally wonders where Olaf is. Through all this, Baptiste is treated as an important guest, although he learns that Olaf was a kind of secret agent, so identity is a normal center of confusion in the household. But Baptiste, who took down the number Olaf dialed in his flat, finds out that the dialee's name is George Sheneve, phones him as Olaf Sildur, then is told that that is impossible as Olaf Sildur is dead, and that he will not get away with it.

So. So Sigrid provides vintage champagne in increasing abundance, gets Baptiste impossibly drunk but continues to care for him and indeed appears to love him more than her missing husband. 

At the same time, both Baptiste and Sigrid seem to live according to Kierkegaard's first basic (aesthetic) state, in which the following question seems very pertinent: 'Et si l'ivresse était le moyen de retrouver le monde d'avant la chute?': 'And if intoxication were the means to recapture the world before the Fall?' Adulthood takes us further and further away from the truth of childhood, and puberty is the essential mark of the descent.

As husband and wife, Baptiste (OK, Olaf) and his wife Sigrid flee to Sweden in Olaf's car, live for a short time on a huge amount of money taken from a bank in Versailles, spend crazily until they are in vast debt, but the bank will continue to lend them vast sums of money because, as ex-wealthy people, they will surely get up there again, won't they? Nothomb called this an extremely serious book.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Mercure (1998)

Mercure takes place in 1923, and is almost wholly set on the tiny imaginary island of Mortes-Frontières, just off the Cherbourg peninsula in France, which is inhabited by 23-year-old Hazel Englert and 73-year-old Captain Loncours, along with several servants. Loncours saved Hazel's life in a World War I coastal bombardment five years before, and, telling her that her face is hideously disfigured, in effect has held her prisoner on the island ever since. She is in fact very beautiful, but as Loncours has banned any mirrors or other objects that could reflect that beauty, she believes him about her appearance and thinks that a reclusive life is better than a public freak show. And as Loncours has saved her life, she sees him as a kind of father figure, and although she dreads it when he comes into her bed, she feels forced to allow him regular sexual favors.

This is obviously another of Amélie Nothomb's prison situations, and Loncours is another of her monsters. When Loncours believes that Hazel is a little sick, he calls in nurse Françoise from the mainland, who has to undergo a search for mirrors or pens on her person, etc, but as Loncours is extremely rich and pays the people he employs very handsomely indeed, he hopes that he can buy the silence of  Françoise, who is not allowed to ask Hazel any questions that have no bearing on any immediate health concerns she may have. But Françoise not only has a conscience, but is also very astute, and when she pretends that Hazel still has non-existent health problems, she is not concerned about the extra money her daily boat trips to the island will bring her, but about how she can convey the truth to Hazel, perhaps especially because a friendship is developing between the two young women.

One day when Loncours is away on the mainland - shortly after Françoise has transgressed gender norms of the day by having a cognac in a bar, where she learns of the suicide of another woman of Loncours's twenty years before - Françoise raids one of his drawers and finds a photo of the woman, Adèle, who looks remarkably similar to Hazel. And on his visit to the mainland, Loncours learns that Françoise has been buying a thermometer every day and hiding the mercury (for its reflective qualities) in Hazel's room. Mercury is also the messenger of the gods in Roman mythology, and the ancient symbol of messengers is the caduceus, which is very similar to the Rod of Asclepius, associated with medicine: Françoise, of course, is a kind of heavenly messenger from the world of health.

So Françoise becomes the second prisoner on Mortes-Frontières, and must devise a plan to escape from the island with Hazel. But although it's obvious that Loncours is immensely self-deceived, Hazel's self-deception might also cause a brief problem. And Nothomb was so indecisive about closure that she provided two endings.

Mercure wheels out the familiar Nothombisms - entrapment, Kierkegaardian religious obedience, Sartrean mauvaise foi, the hell of other people, angels and monsters, youth and age, beauty and ugliness, lost innocence, intense female friendships, etc - but every one of her books is very different from the other, and I see this as one of her best, in spite of a few oddities: why can't Hazel feel her non-existent deformity, and why is it so easy for the 'angels' to escape from the human bulldogs in the first ending? Very minor niggles, to be sure.

As yet, there is no English translation of Mercure.

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
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Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista (2003)

The work of Georges Bernanos - and his conception of evil in particular - is a very strong influence on Amélie Nothomb: in Antéchrista (translated into English as Antichrista) she quotes Bernanos from L'imposture (1927): 'La médiocrité, c'est l'indifférence au bien et au mal.' The book of Nothomb's that is most thematically similar to this novel, perhaps, is Les catilinaires (The Stranger Next Door in the English translation). Nothomb has called herself an outsider, and believes that the popularity of her work is the result of other outsiders reading her. As an adolescent, she read books about concentration camps - which should not surprise readers of Acide sulphurique, or even Le sabotage amoureux, which relates her childhood memories of San Li Tun, a diplomatic ghetto in Mao's China. But Nothomb also portrays social situations - even the mind itself - as concentration camps.

The list of authors Nothomb is influenced by is far too numerous to mention, but Sartre is certainly one, and although not by any means the most important, there is a strong message of 'Hell is other people' is her work, with main characters isolated and apparently impotent as others walk all over them and try to destroy their lives. In Les catalinaires, the monstrous Palamède Bernardin - essentially a mass of flesh with ludicrously little intellectual life - becomes Émile Hazel's tortionnaire (or torturer). But Christa - a 16-year-old the social misfit Blanche meets at university in Belgium - is very different from Bernardin, as she is young, attractive, very successful socially, and becomes Blanche's friend... Well, for a few moments, before becoming her torturer, and well before it's discovered that she's, er, an imposter.

It is stated many times that Christa comes from an impoverished background, and the friendless Blanche - after being made aware that Christa has to get up so early in the morning and travel so many hours just to reach her place of education - is elated when her parents (both teachers) take her in on weekdays without charge: what more could parents do for the financially poor best (and only) friend of their daughter?

Rapidly, Blanche's parents are won over by Christa to such an extent that she not only dominates their daughter's life, but also their own, and they don't realize how manipulative she's becoming. Blanche of course does, and realizes that she not only never had a friend, but that this person is now her torturer.

It takes a visit to Malmedy, the home town of Antichrista (as she is now silently called by Blanche), to discover that Antichrista's David Bowie look-alike boyfriend is in reality fat and ugly, but - much more condemning - Antichrista's parents live in a big house, her father owns a chain of companies, and Antichrista has told so many malicious lies, and...

And Blanche doesn't take Émile's way out, so there's a progression from Nothomb's earlier book, but what anyway is the non-violent equivalent of dealing with guys like Bernadin - as you certainly can't kiss them!

My Amélie Nothomb posts:
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Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires

Four Autobiographical Novels by Amélie Nothomb

Métaphysique des tubes (2000) is a reconstruction of the first three years of Amélie Nothomb's life, and I have said a few words about this in the Hygiène de l'assassin post below. To repeat, Nothomb's was a breech birth: her buttocks came into the world first, her head at first refused to leave her mother, and her umbilical cord was strangling her. She did not cry, and the first two and a half years of her life were spent in silence and without movement.

The sixth word that Nothomb spoke was 'death', and this is significant for someone who had effectively spent two years and a half years apparently dead: her parents referred to her as 'la Plante'. Nothomb claims that she remembers her early words, although the early silent period of her life is obviously a fictionalization here - and is the most interesting part of the book -  but occupies less than 30 pages of it. Nothomb, who refused her mother's breast, is in a sense a nothing, a tube to feed, but at the same time a kind of god in a pre-verbal universe of her own. There is no 'I'.

This early childhood is evidently far from usual, and in fact there are elements of autism and anorexia in it. She refuses her mother's milk, and even when deprived of food, she doesn't cry out for it: 'To eat or not to eat, to drink or not to drink, that was all the same to it: to be or not to be was not its question.'

When Amélie finally makes a noise, it is colossal, her father calls his mother in Brussels to fly immediately to Japan as the Plant has come alive, but it is only when the grandmother Claude comes that Amélie really comes alive. Weaned on milk from a feeding bottle, purée with bits of meat in it, crushed banana, grated apple and orange juice, Claude surreptitiously gives Amélie a bar of white chocolate, the Plant tastes the forbidden fruit, and 'it' becomes 'I'.  The bodily pleasure is overwhelming, almost of a religious order, and here we find an echo of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of the key texts of Nothomb's philosophical studies. There are many philosophical ruminations in Métaphysique de tubes.

The young Amélie develops a huge appetite for learning too, and will become gifted, speaking Japanese (picked up from the family help Nishio-san) almost as well as she speaks French. She learns that words give reality to things.

But no words shouted to save her life are heeded by the holidaying Japanese when Amélie is drowning in the sea: the debt owed for the action of saving a life is too great in this oriental society. But the theme of water recurs. To her parents, Amélie seems fascinated by fish, and carp in particular, so they buy her three for her third birthday, and she must feed them every day. In reality carp horrify her,  reminding her of the days when she was a silent tube, and of course there's a French expression 'muet comme une carpe', or 'silent as a carp'. Death and water come together again, and Amélie tries to drown herself in the fishpond.

This is far removed from your average autobiography.

Le sabotage amoreux (1993) covers the period from 1972 to 1975, beginning when Nothomb was aged just aged five. The family moved there from Japan, and Amélie's mother Danièle was struck by the ugliness of the place.

This was the closed, secretive China of the Gang of Four era, and a kind of double alienation was enforced on expatriates: it wasn't just the strange, rather forbidding country that was China, but non-Chinese people had to live in the San Li Tun ghetto, and were allowed no contact with the Chinese. Consequently, although this is Amélie's Chinese novel, China is in effect absent from it. Reading Le sabotage amoureux, Amélie's father Patrick was stunned by the level of understanding that his five-year-old daughter had of Chinese politics.

In Hygiène de l'assassin, puberty is seen by Tach - and Nothomb has emphatically stated 'Prétextat Tach, c'est moi' - as a kind of fall ('le pire des maux': 'the worst of evils'). She saw age in Hegelian terms, with childhood the thesis, puberty the antithesis, and adulthood the synthesis. In Le sabotage amoureux, the Amélie character says: 'J'ai toujours su que l'âge adulte ne comptait pas : dès la puberté, l'existence n'est plus qu'un épilogue': 'I've always known that adulthood didn't count: as soon as puberty comes, existence is no more than an epilogue.' Only in 2002, with Robert des noms propres, does she state that happiness is possible in adulthood. For the moment, though, adulthood is lived in parentheses, and is not real living at all. Adults are fallen children.

In China, Amélie is free in the ghetto, where the children play at war with weapons of urine and vomit, those from East Germany against the rest. It is a rather bleak vision, but tempered by Nothombian humor.

Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam (2007)

Stupeur et tremblements (1999) is Nothomb's third Japanese novel, and describes the misadventures at work she underwent during the second part of her stay when she returned to Japan to refind the country of her birth. The title Stupeur et tremblements is close to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the title chosen for the English translation, and alludes to Kierkegaard's third stage of human existence. This is the religious one, but outside of conventional religion, beyond reason, a world of fear and trembling.

Nothomb has stated that it wasn't her intention in this book to criticize Japan, but the horror of a modern system that crushes the individual. She had a contract for a year with a huge import-export business, and in spite of the humiliating and insulting nature of her time there - particularly in the last seven months - she chose to honor her contract, as any Japanese person would have done. She fictionalizes the names involved, apart of course from herself, whom her fellow workers call Amélie-san.

Normally, even a one-year work contract in Japan is - paradoxically - for life. There is a Japanese word - madogiwazoku, or 'window-seat tribe' - used to describe employees that companies no longer have any use for, but don't sack them or make them redundant - they just shun them, make them feel dishonored, and give them a seat by the window with nothing to do but stare out of it. This situation doesn't normally occur until years have elapsed, of course, but Amélie-san, in a period of just five months, is reduced to cleaning the toilets.

Saito, Amélie-san's superior in the pecking order, initially gives her a letter to write, then rips it up, ripping up many other attempts without looking at them, and he later throws away many other thousand-sheeted photocopying attempts again without looking at them. But before this, she becomes the tea woman, making a grave error by suggesting to businessmen she serves at a meeting that she can speak fluent Japanese. She is passed on to Fubuki Muri, who - exceptionally - is a woman who has risen in the work ranks, but who is unmarried at the age of 30, which is shameful, and who lives her own hell of psychological torture as a result of it. Inevitably, perhaps, Amélie-san receives the brunt of Fubuki's frustrations. Committing error after error, and insulted by Fubuki constantly, Amélie-san's descent to the office lavatory attendent - on the 44th floor, the same one where the elevator 'spat' her out at the beginning - is rapid.  And all this because the 'stupid' Amélie-san has been astute enough to see the chinks in Fubuki's armor.

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My Amélie Nothomb posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Amélie Nothomb: Autobiographical novels
Amélie Nothomb: Hygiène de l'assassin
Amélie Nothomb: Robert des noms propres
Amélie Nothomb: Les Combustibles
Amélie Nothomb: Antichrista
Amélie Nothomb: Tuer le père
Amélie Nothomb: Le fait du prince
Amélie Nothomb: Péplum
Amélie Nothomb: Le voyage d'hiver
Amélie Nothomb: Une forme de vie
Amélie Nothomb: Acide Sulfurique
Amélie Nothomb: Mercure
Amélie Nothomb: Journal d'Hirondelle
Amélie Nothomb: Attentat
Amélie Nothomb: Cosmétique de l'ennemi
Amélie Nothomb: Les Catilinaires