Amélie Nothombs book about her father’s special life fascinates until the end ★★★☆☆

Exactly 30 years ago, Amélie Nothomb, then 26, stunned the French literary world with her debut novel Hygiene de l’assassin (Hygiene of the killer, 1995) about an old, fat, misanthropic writer who allows himself to be interviewed for the first time two months before his death. From one moment to the next, no one could ignore the Belgian. She joined talk shows and is very mediagenic with her black clothes, white face and red lips. Seemingly without hesitation, she tells charmingly and in neat sentences about her work and her life as if she had never done anything else.

Since then, she has submitted a new novel to her publisher every year. Her work has been translated into many languages, has been made into plays and films and Hygiene de l’assassin was even the inspiration for an opera. Nothomb follows a spartan writing regimen: every morning at 4 a.m., she starts with a pint of strong black tea, which puts her in the right frame of mind to start writing. She writes until 10 o’clock. Then she leaves for her publisher to answer her mail for 5 hours. Each letter writer receives a personal and handwritten answer. With some fans, especially girls and young women, she has been corresponding for years.

Baron Nothombi

That loyal readership accounts for hundreds of thousands of titles sold each year. In front of soif (Thirst, 2021) the counter is now at 300,000. From novel number 30, Premier sangwhich was awarded the Prix Renaudot last year and is now translated into Dutch as bloodline, 257,000 copies have been sold to date. Nothomb is her best marketing tool herself: her portrait has graced every book cover for about ten years now.

bloodline is inspired by the life of her father, Patrick Nothomb, who passed away in March 2020. This book is one of the better Nothombs. It is noteworthy that her autobiographical novels are more interesting than the nonsense about adolescents with strange first names (Plectrude, Petronilla) or the fairy tales revived by Nothomb (Bluebeard, Riket with the crest). However serious their subject matter is (toxic girl friendships, bad relationships between parents and their children, anorexia, love, death) and however cleverly written, the idea for these books is usually more fun than the execution, they don’t stick. The Goncourt nominee Thirst is somewhere in between: it is inspired by the New Testament, a book that Nothomb already appreciated as a child.

The Autobiographical Novels (God’s entrails, With fear and trembling, Sado .’s fiancée, Nostalgia of happiness) have always been inspired by her years in Japan until now. The writer likes to flirt with her Japanese roots. She is said to have been born in 1967 in a suburb of Kobe. Someone who researched this for a literary science article found out that her birth was a year earlier, in Etterbeek, near Brussels. She lived in Japan from the age of 2 to 5, a period that would deeply influence her, and perhaps even more so in contrast to the years that followed, which she spent in Maoist China. Of bloodline – biographical, not Japanese – about her father’s childhood in Belgium and his first appointment as consul-general in the newly independent Congo, Nothomb has taken a different path. And for after the summer Le livre des soeurs planned, that must be an ode to Amélie’s beloved older sister Juliette.

In bloodline Nothomb describes how Patrick Nothomb, born in 1936, grew up in Brussels, with his maternal grandparents. His father is dead, his mother keeps aloof, his grandmother adores him and his grandfather thinks he must harden otherwise he will remain a daddy’s child. Therefore, when he is 6, he sends Patrick to his paternal grandfather. Baron Nothomb lives with his family in a dilapidated castle in the Ardennes. Patrick is over the moon. His five uncles and aunts (the oldest is 13, the youngest 6) appear to him as a horde of Huns. They do not receive any education, the law of the fittest applies here. He does what he can to adapt. The cute little boy in his sailor suit who had kissed Grandma goodbye on July 1st is no longer afraid of anything when he returns at the end of August. The sailor suit is in tatters, by the way. He can’t wait for the next vacation to go back.

Biggest hostage taking

As always in Nothombs books, the first part is the most entertaining. The proverbial night candle applies to her endings. But in this novel, the ending is also strong. After a start with episodes that could have come straight out of Peter Pan’s Neverland and then a romantic engagement, reality hits hard after 140 pages. In those last 35 pages, Nothomb draws on her father’s published memories of the largest hostage-taking in history, the 1964 Stanleyville (now Kisangani) hostage-taking. A group of insurgents calling themselves the Simbas occupy large parts of eastern Congo, take Stanleyville and demand that the Belgian government recognize their independence from the rest of the Congo. To enforce this, they imprison about five hundred Belgian residents of the city in a large hotel. Patrick Nothomb does what he can as a diplomat to save time and avoid casualties: he talks. He talks incessantly with his captors, often until he and his audience fall asleep. He realizes that he could never have survived without his vacations with the Nothomb family.

Amélie Nothomb says she writes about four books a year, one of which she has published. bloodline is her hundredth. It’s actually a shame that she uses her talent for so many little books that matter little when you know she’s also capable of something better. Not literature with a capital L, but a well-written and entertaining story in that unmistakable, jumpy style that you don’t immediately forget as soon as you close the book.