“My parents forced me to write to my grandfather,” she recalls. Following her diplomat father, young Amélie spent her first five years in Japan before moving to China, Burma, Bangladesh and Laos, among other posts. But there are surely worse ways to get back in gear than by reading one of her marvelous novels, which tend to mix autobiography, impossible love, eating disorders and a cold and cynical, but highly hilarious, outlook on life.Īlthough her work has now been translated into 39 languages, Amélie Nothomb wasn’t exactly predestined to rival Georges Simenon and Tintin’s creator Hergé as Belgium’s most successful writer.
#Amelie nothomb books cracked
“When the latest Nothomb arrives, you’re put on notice: summer vacation is over!” a well-known critic cracked a few years ago. Discovered in France in 1992 with her first novel, Hygiene and the Assassin, Nothomb has ever since been a popular fixture of September’s rentrée littéraire-the start of the literary season-and her novels regularly sell more than 200,000 copies each.
Outgoing, incisive and ironic, this Amélie belongs to a distinctly less idealistic world. Born in Kobe, Japan, to Belgian diplomats, Amélie Nothomb is a far cry from the elfin young waitress played in the film by Audrey Tautou. Her name may be Amélie, but she’s definitely not from Montmartre. Her latest: Une Forme de Vie, a fictional exchange of letters with an American soldier in Iraq. They never met in person.With a new book out almost every year, the Belgian novelist is one of the most popular writers in France. She used the French Minitel, while he used the Italian Videotel system, connected with the French one. Many ideas inserted in her books come from the conversations she had with an Italian man, from late eighties and during the nineties. She has written a romanticized biography ( The Book of Proper Names) for the French female singer Robert in 2002 and during the period 2000-2002 she wrote the lyrics for nine tracks of the same artist. Her experience of this time is told in Fear and Trembling.
After some family tensions, she returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company in Tokyo. She studied philology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. There, she reportedly felt as much a stranger as everywhere else. Nothomb moved often, and did not live in Europe until she was 17, when she moved to Brussels. « Quitter le Japon fut pour moi un arrachement » (“Leaving Japan was a wrenching separation for me”) she writes in Fear and Trembling. When she was five, the family moved to China. While in Japan, Nothomb attended a local school and learned Japanese. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 1999 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française the Prix René-Fallet and the 1993 Prix Alain-Fournier. Since then, she has published approximately one novel per year, including Les Catilinaires (1995), Fear and Trembling (1999) and Métaphysique des tubes (published in English as The Character of Rain) (2000). Nothomb's first novel, Hygiène de l'assassin, was published in 1992. She is from a distinguished Belgian political family she is notably the grandniece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian foreign minister (1980-1981) and great granddaughter of writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She lived there until she was five years old, and then subsequently lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, a stint in Coventry and Laos.
Amélie Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan to Belgian diplomats.
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