In Beijing, all the animals were prisoners: donkeys heavily loaded, horses firmly attached to enormous carriages, pigs that read their soon-to-come death in the eyes of a starving population to whom we weren’t allowed to say a word.’ ‘My world was inhabited by birds and monkeys - she says - by fish and squirrels, each one free in the fluidity of its space. ![]() In contrast, she then moved, in 1972, to China. The hardest to leave behind was Japan - a land of abundance where nature could be observed in its purest form and a land of tranquillity where everything was loving - especially when she found herself in the arms of her nanny, Nishio-san. The experience is extensively described in The Life of Hunger, a semi-autobiographical narrative in which she portrays the life of a girl whose world was revolutionized every three years by moving to different countries and therefore, worlds. Being the daughter of a Belgian diplomat, she spent the first years of her life in the beautiful outskirts of Kobe, Japan. To fully understand Nothomb’s work, though, we have to look into her childhood. ![]() The simplistic style that makes it very easy to read can also make it literarily plain, lacking the details that constitute excellence. Hygiene and the Assassin is a good example of the hypothesis that Nothomb has the qualities and defects of a commercial author writing for a big audience: good plot, complete characters but also dangerously approaching the cliché with regularity, as some critics would say. This is generally what tends to happen in Nothomb’s novels: the energy is almost all directed towards one strong main character, while she seems to forget to give the other characters any peculiarity, making them rather two-dimensional. He somehow represents the social outcast or the artist who lives independently from the world, who we all sometimes - even if secretly - would like to be. He proves to be cruel and quite grotesque yet sympathetic at the same time. The latter, though, left to its subsidiary role, tends to resemble stage directions and is therefore a bit awkward. The story, in this case, is fortified by the strength of the dialogue, which overtakes most of the action and is powerful enough to subsist almost independently without the narrative. This, accompanied by the fluidity of the prose, might just be the key ingredient that makes her a best-selling author. ![]() But if we can get past that, after reading this novel, one thing can easily be concluded: Nothomb is a wonderful plotter. The fact that a woman should succeed where many men have failed - attention being brought to her gender and the implication that it is somehow related to her success - is a cliché. She will be his nemesis and will challenge him into a duel where the word is a deadly weapon. It is only then that a woman, Nina, enters the scene. ![]() But, by the power of his mordacious speech, the mean old man tortures the journalists - all inexperienced, naïve and poorly prepared - one after the other. Hygiene And The Assassin is about an old, obese, dying Nobel Prize-winning writer, who is solicited by countless journalists when they hear that he only has two months left to live and are, therefore, expecting to get one last, big interview. In 1992, 25-year-old Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb published her first novel, which would become an instant success.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |