Amelie Nothomb – A “Must Read” Author

You may as well get on the Amelie Nothomb bandwagon now rather than later. She has already written 13 novels and has received about as much critical acclaim as one writer can stand. She is technically from Belgium and writes in French. Her father having been a Belgian diplomat, she was actually born in Kobe, Japan and has lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, Coventry, and Laos.
I discovered Amelie Nothomb about four or five years ago through reading about her in the Complete Review http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html, that comprehensive and trusted source for world literature. Here are the grades that the Complete Review has assigned to her novels so far.

• Anti-Christa    B-
• The Book of Proper Names     B
• The Character of Rain    A-
• Cosmetique de l’ennemmi     A-
• Fear and Trembling     A-
• The Life of Hunger    A
• Loving Sabotage      A+
• Mercure      B
• Pep’lum     B+
• The Stranger Next Door      B
• Sulphiric Acid    B
• Tokyo Fiancee     B+

Anyone who has read the Complete Review realizes that the grade of A+ for “Loving Sabotage” is virtually unheard of in the annals of the Complete Review. I have read six of her novels : “The Character of Rain”, “Fear and Trembling”, “The Life of Hunger”, “Loving Sabotage”, “The Stranger Next Door”, and her latest, “Tokyo Fiancee”.

How to describe her writing? Amelie Nothomb is the most cosmopolitan and autobiographical of novelists, yet her novels are light and amusing as a souffle’. Her novels are usually quite short, no longer than they need to be, very direct and simple. “Fear and Trembling” is about a young woman / girl just out of high school working for a Japanese company She writes about the unique attitudes and behaviors that are part of business in Japan, but only as part of the story she is relating. Much of the novel is quite mercilessly humorous about the Japanese business culture. “Loving Sabotage” is about a young 7-year-old child living in China in the 1970s, told from the perspective of an adult. “The Character of Rain” is the story of a baby’s first three years of life inside the infant brain. “Tokyo Fiancee” is a light novel about the romance between a young Japanese guy and a western girl who lives in Japan.

In a way, Amelie Nothomb reminds me somewhat of the Dutch writer Michel Faber. Neither of these writers can be pinned down to any one country; they belong to many countries. Both Nothomb and Faber write wonderful short novels or novellas.

Amelie Nothomb is already widely popular in France, and she is each year gaining more readers in the English speaking countries. If you start to read her books, you will continue to read her books.