This is a slightly different biography, mixing Wikipedia and other
sources with my personal opinion of her.
Amélie Nothomb is a very interesting writer, quite
different from the others writers I know. She stems from a Belgian noble
family. Her father was the Belgian diplomat Patrick Nothomb, and she is
the grandniece of Charles Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian Foreign Secretary
(1960–2001), and the great-granddaughter of the writer and politician Pierre
Nothomb. She is a Commander of the Order of the Crown and has had the title of
Baroness bestowed upon her by King Philippe of Belgium.
But I have said that she is a very different person
for other reasons. Let’s see. For starters, she has two places and two
dates of birth. According to some sources, she was born in Etterbeek (Brussels) on
9 July 1966, Belgium, but according to herself, she was born in Kobe
(Japan) in 1967. It is a metaphorical statement, since her childhood
memories begin in Japan, where she lived from the ages of two to five, the time
that most deeply marked his character, due to his learning at school, and his
close relationship with his beloved Nanny.
After living in Japan, she lived in China, New
York, Bangladesh, Burma, The United Kingdom and Laos, and
finally in Belgium. All these transfers were due to his father’s profession (a
diplomat, as I said) and undoubtedly marked her character. In Biographie
de la faim, at one point in the novel she writes: “the majority of
international terrorists are children of diplomats. It does not surprise me”.
Her sense of humour, cynical and intelligent, is one of her main
characteristics.
She has a brother and a sister, and she has always felt very close to the latter, with
whom she takes refuge imagining fictional worlds (and both writing about that)
during their childhood, in which they saw the horror of hunger and misery of
places like China or Bangladesh.
At the age of 17, she discovered Europe, and more
specifically Belgium, where at first she felt like a foreigner. She studied
Romance Philology at the Free University of Brussels (with liberal socialist
tendencies), where she found it difficult to integrate because her last name
evokes her family’s extreme right-wing past. She refers to this experience in
her novel Antichrista.
After graduating at the age of 21, she returned to
Tokyo and worked for a year in a large Japanese company. She recounts this
experience in her novel Fear and Trembling. When she
returned to Belgium, she wrote her first novel, Hygiène de l’assassin,
which was very well received by the critics and the public. From that moment,
she devoted herself exclusively to writing. According to her own explanation,
she spends four hours a day writing, and she writes three novels a year, of
which she only publishes one. She has written more than thirty novels and
almost 20 short stories.
In 2012, Luca Chiari directed the
documentary Amélie Nothomb: une vie entre deux eaux (“A Life
Between Two Waters”) about Amélie’s return to Japan, where she rediscovered the
beauty of its landscapes, its peaceful rites, the sadness of Fukushima, but
especially, where she met again her Japanese nursemaid, Nishio San.
She is, as I have already said, very special even by
the way of presenting herself. In her photos on her books, she always
appears dressed in black and wearing a big hat, which gives her a distant, even
cold appearance.
In my opinion, perhaps it’s the way of creating a
character that allows her to stay hidden, and also away from fashion. As she
explains in her numerous autobiographical books, Amélie does not consider
herself beautiful at all, but she admires beauty, especially feminine beauty,
and that way of showing herself, always just her face and little else, protects
her from her unattractive appearance (according to her, who also says that she
is quite short and suffers from scoliosis).
All her novels are interesting, especially the
autobiographical ones, and almost all of them are short and easy to read
because they are captivating and full of surrealism and intelligence.
Try reading this author, because I am sure you will
enjoy her a lot.
SUMMARY
I’m going to make a general summary of the entire
book, in order to awaken your curiosity and your desire to read it. I hope I
get it without too many spoilers. For that reason I’ll focus on explaining what
was happening around the book at that time, especially the motivation that led
Amélie Nothomb to go to Japan, and the feelings she had during that year.
Firstly, in my opinion, we are faced with a book about
love, about crazy, excessive, disproportionate and absurd love. All these
adjectives also serve to describe the content of the book.
At the age of 20, Amélie Nothomb was in love with
Japan, or more precisely with an idea of Japan, the one she had of the Japan of
her early childhood, between two and five years old, with a loving nanny, a
school she loved attending and using a language she found sublime. In some of
her books, she speaks with pride of the Japanese language, with a forceful
pronunciation and significant ideographs, instead of the pitiful language her
brothers were forced to study at the same time (English), a “boiled” language,
according to her, in which some words mix with others forming a broth that is
sometimes unintelligible (I agree, by the way). She remembers herself
writing at school, and reading Japanese books (not children’s stories but books
for adults) with enthusiasm.
Isn’t it incredible that someone could write and read
fluently in Japanese at that age, and that her memories of that time are so
clear? However, that is what she describes very clearly in at least two of her
books: Le sabotage amoreux (1999) and Biographie de la
faim (2004), both autobiographical. In
both she makes it clear, and still considers it so, that the separation from
Japan to go living in China (the communist China of the eighties) was the most
painful and traumatic separation of her life. That was the reason
why, after having finished his studies in Romance Philology, she made
every effort to obtain the degree of Japanese translator, so that she could go
to work for one of the most important corporate companies in that country for a
year.
And, at that point, the book begins. During that
year, she will go from being practically nobody, with no one below her, to
being much less than nothing, suffering an endless number of hilarious,
humiliating, absurd and degrading situations. And she overcame all of this for
love, for her love to Japan.
Instead of rebelling, as would be expected of someone
with her character, she tries incessantly to understand, and even justify,
these tyrannical behaviours of unlimited cruelty based on absurd rites of
honour, which despise Westerners in general and women in particular (Japanese
women are not exempt from this either, within a deeply sexist and classist
society). And she tells us this with a great sense of humour, often close to
sarcasm and surrealism, and with a great feeling of acceptance, even with a rare
and almost inexplicable pleasure.
In my opinion, the thing we have to thank that year in
Japan for is that Amélie Nothomb decided that, after her return to
Europe, she would dedicate herself exclusively to writing. The countless times
she committed metaphorical suicide by jumping into the void through the company
bay windows (a little spoiler, sorry), and flying over the wonderful landscapes
of her beloved Japan, stimulated her imagination (already prodigious) and
helped her to make that decision.
If you try reading Biographie de la faim and Fear
and trembling you will be able to know Nothomb childhood and
early youth, and perhaps to begin to appreciate his particular way of writing,
and even of her being hedonistic, solitary, caustic, surreal and as fun as
difficult to understand.
QUESTIONS
-What is the relation of the title with the novel?
Does it have any relation with the book by Søren Kierkegaard?
-Why the reference to Aristotle?
-What do you know about the Japanese culture? Have you
been there? Nothomb observations, are they clichés or real habits?
-Nothomb mentions Cleopatra and her nose. Do you think
a so small detail can change the History?
-If you were to live abroad, what would be more
important for you, to keep your culture and traditions, or to adapt to your new
situation?
VOCABULARY
spat me out, bay
window, open-plan, scornful, tore it up, output, refrain, umpteenth, brimmed,
complexion, carnation, mourned, downfall, lair, ashen, dumbfounded, losing
face, probed, slumped, kanji
