(Paris) Novelist with gargantuan productivity, media creature as much adulated as criticized, Amélie Nothomb, 2021 laureate of the French literary prize Renaudot for First blood, found in words enough to quench his existential thirst.
Since his first book Hygiene of the assassin in 1992, the Belgian writer with Gothic hats wrote tirelessly, publishing every year in August and with the same frenzy, a work of almost constant popular success.
Stupors and tremors (1999), Metaphysics of tubes (2000), Neither Eve nor Adam (2007), Epicene first names (2018)… Fairy tale, mythological tale, scholarly dialogue, detective plot, autofiction: each novel exceeds 200,000 copies and paperback sales are considerable. Not to mention the translations in more than 40 languages.
Seasonal head of the gondola, it defies its detractors who regularly criticize the uneven quality of an abundant production (around thirty novels since 1992).
In fact, Amélie Nothomb, now 55, claims to write between three and four novels a year to publish only one. “The others will never be disclosed. I have made testamentary arrangements for this ”.
A childhood in Japan
All are written according to the same ritual: in the morning, at dawn, between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., the little brunette with the rounded white forehead sits down on her sofa and writes with an old ballpoint pen, in a notebook, on her knees. The extravagant writer, with round eyes and black eyebrows, has no computer, internet or cell phone.
This former anorexic and bulimic, who claimed on TV shows that she was eating rotten fruit and roquefort, is obsessed with thirst, satiety, hunger and overflow. She also gave the title Thirst to his 2019 novel.
In Metaphysics of tubes (2000), she evokes her early childhood where she experienced “the absolute serenity of the cylinder”. Swallowing, digestion, excretion: in Japan, where she was born on July 9, 1966, while her father was a consul, she experienced “absolute satisfaction”. She thinks she is God.
The felicity lasts five years, little Fabienne-Amélie, pampered by an adored Japanese governess, a loving Belgian mother and a sister two years her senior, has a happy early childhood, which she has never ceased to mythologize in her books. .
After this “fundamental tearing away” from Japan, she lives to the rhythm of the assignments of her father diplomat: China, New York, Burma, Laos … These moves reinforce her precocity (she knows how to read at 3, listens to Gregorian chants and thinks she is an alcoholic at 8 by dint of finishing the guests’ glasses of champagne) and she increases her appetite for the world tenfold. But at the same time, “it creates a very great anxiety, never resolved”.
Literature, the only stability
“I very quickly knew that my universe would not be stable and that I would lose everything, every three years; that the apocalypse would be a regular phenomenon […] Language and literature were going to become the only stable thing in my life ”.
At age 12, the rape by four men in the waters of the Bay of Bengal, recounted briefly in Hunger biography (2004), causes “pure and hard” anorexia. Amélie’s hunger is extinguished. His “adolescence is ransacked”. At 15, failing to die, she becomes obsessed with reading.
When her family finally lands in Belgium, she is a young girl who thinks herself ugly, uprooted, friendless. At 16, she spoke Latin and studied philology in Brussels. Unable to communicate with Westerners, she returned to Tokyo at age 21, with a Greco-Latin aggregation in her pocket.
In Stupors and tremors, she tells about her misadventures in a Japanese company where a ruthless hierarchy reigns. Failing to be fired, she ends up as the establishment’s pee lady. And understand that she is not Japanese.
She then begins to write. The rest of his life began in 1992 with Hygiene of the assassin. “Cultivate what you feel when you are thirsty. Here is the mystical impulse ”, she makes Christ say in Thirst.