Penelope and Amelie

Of late most fiction has left me disenchanted even when book reviews suggest otherwise. Plot devices are shop worn; the characters stereotypes and most are imbued with a kind of immature socio-political thinking that passes for radical these days. Perhaps I am jaded, understandable given I read a book every week. Then you pick up a book that’s so strangely thrilling that you cannot name the sensation you feel each time you pick it up. Other readers appear to concur. After all The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald’s fictionalization of the early life of the German romanticist Novalis has made it to many lists and appears to have been the most garlanded book of its year of release. And it is singular, wondrous, fresh, distilled and beautiful. More wondrously it was published when the author was nearly 80. You finish the book and for a moment, you want to stand in Fitzgerald’s shoes and see the world through her eyes.

Then I read Amelie Nothomb. If Fitzgerald flowered in her 60s, Nothomb appears to have been born with all petals unfurled. Even when she is charmingly arch and egoistic, even when a book meanders as with The Life of Hunger, her voice is so distinctive and so – well, Nothomb – that one can’t but be swept along. Sadly, her fiction is not as appealing as the recreation of her childhood. Which of course is so completely strange and spent in so many countries that none of it could have been made up (and Nothomb assures us often that it is all true). Nothomb writes as an adult but somehow the voice in the book is that of her younger self. Like the 20 something Nothomb of Fear and Trembling (her account of a year working in a Japanese corporation), you stand pressed to the glass pane of Nothomb’s fiction ready to boldly fling oneself into it.

And here's the Guardian on Nothomb.