Paris, les Champs Élysées,
Virgin Megastore,
September 2008, early evening.
The huge waiting crowd included the French intelligentsia, Sorbonne students, businessmen, the Parisian jet set, Marilyn Manson look-alikes, bobos (the bourgeois-bohemian crowd), the press, and a man who appeared to be a priest. This book launch, in celebration of Le Fait du Prince, Amélie Nothomb’s seventeenth published novel, was l’événement of Paris’s fall literary season; similarly, her 2009 novel, Le Voyage d’Hiver, is the main event of her publisher’s fall season.
Every year since the 1992 publication of her award-winning first novel, Hygiéne de l’assassin (forthcoming in English, as Hygiene and the Assassin, from Europa Editions in Fall 2010), Amélie Nothomb has published one novel a year, brought out in high style each September during la rentrée, when the most sought-after books appear on the French market. Her publishing house, Albin Michel, opens its season with her book launch. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages, including eleven in English, and her awards include the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, the Prix René-Fallet, the Prix Alain-Fournier (twice), the Grand Prix Jean-Giono, and many others.
She’s a phenomenon in France. In the tradition of Dead heads, groupies called “les Péplautes” (their name derives from her 1996 novel, Péplum) devote a good portion of their lives to following Nothomb from reading to reading, attending her lectures, and keeping up with the latest details of her peregrinations. But Amélie Nothomb is not French. The daughter of Belgian diplomats, she was born in Kobe, Japan, and spent a large portion of her childhood abroad in China, Laos, Bangladesh, Burma, and back in Japan. Many of these experiences are an integral part of her novels.
Her dark, witty books often draw directly from life experiences up to the period of her midtwenties and deal with themes ranging from complex familial relationships (in particular with parents), awkward first love, adoration and rivalry between best friends, and spiritual awakening. Add to this Nothomb’s depiction of the exotic, deeply rooted differences between East and West and her fascination—or obsession—with language, food and the body. Linguistic and cultural misunderstandings are often at the center of her novels and the plot plays out around these confusions and misinterpretations. Her prose is replete with the elegance and hierarchical structure inherent in French. After studying philology at l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, she has an ear finely tuned to sound and expression.
The French have completely adopted her, doting on her as on one of their own for nearly twenty years, yet her work has been overlooked in the United States. It could be that the very things French readers love and admire in contemporary fiction don’t translate well—figuratively speaking—to a native English-language audience. (The English translations themselves are very well attuned to her sense of and sensitivity to language.) Or it could be that Americans expect French-language literary fiction to be more along the lines of the concise, minimalist prose of Michel Houellebecq or Catherine Millet, rather than, in Nothomb’s own words, her “megalomaniac bent” toward lyricism, as she said in a book review in the New York Times.
Yet Amélie Nothomb is an extremely gentle, sincere, and generous person. Greeting me in the lobby of her publishers, she graciously offered me coffee, tea, or an electric fan—it was a humid morning. In her smallish office, crowded with piles and columns of letters stacked in all directions, she helped me fasten down my papers as they fluttered in the breeze.
NOTA BENE:
In some portions of the interview, I’ve included the original French phrase for clarity in hopes of better illustrating Amélie Nothomb’s vivid, rich use of the language.
Heather Hartley: I think that Rainer Maria Rilke was and still is a very important writer for you. You explained, “Reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when I was seventeen gave me permission to write.” What did the Letters reveal to you?
Amélie Nothomb: I come from a family in which literature is sacred and where one reads a lot. There’s a very, very high esteem for literature. It’s wonderful to come from a family where there’s this great esteem, but at the same time, it doesn’t encourage you to write at all—on the contrary. Because if literature is seen as an act that’s so sacred, the only possible thing you can think is, “I don’t have the right to write, I don’t have the right to write,” because it’s a sacred act and who am I to imagine that I have this right?
So I would never dare to have had the ambition to be a writer, even though I do think that somewhere, somehow inside of me, I did have the real need to write. But I wouldn’t allow myself to even think it.
Then I read Letters to a Young Poet, and in this masterpiece, Rilke poses this question of writing in a totally different way. In his eyes, the only question that someone who wants to write should ask themselves is: To what point do I need to write? Is it a question of life or death? From the moment where it’s a question of life or death, then you have the right to write. If it’s not a question of life or death, you don’t have this right.
For me it was such an incredibly new way to see things. It’s really thanks to Rilke that I dared to write.
HH: In his Letters he wrote, “A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity.” And for you writing is a necessity—urgent, organic, and fecund.
AN: Completely.
HH: You’ve said you are “empty and then boom the seed is planted. I’m suddenly pregnant and then I set to work.” What role does the unconscious play in your work?
AN: I think it’s absolutely primordial. I’ve spoken of becoming pregnant. Know that all of this happens unbeknownst to me—these pregnancies are infinitely mysterious to me. [The French expression is “tomber enceinte,” literally “to fall pregnant.”]
I’m forty-one years old and I still don’t know how all of this happens. And yet I’m pregnant now for the sixty-sixth time. Somebody could say, “Listen, you should know by now—for someone so often pregnant—at least how this happens to you.” In any case, I don’t know. It’s something you cannot schedule or control in any way. It just happens. You don’t know when it’ll be coming. And you hope that it will come and continue to come.
All the time I live in fear that I’ll stop becoming pregnant. Luckily, until now, it’s always happened but it absolutely doesn’t depend on my will. And it’s true that when I see the triggers that make me pregnant, they’re such small things, that inevitably the unconscious plays an enormous role.
HH: What happens when a trigger is set off? Could you try and describe it?
AN: Between the moment when the trigger occurs in my brain and the moment I understand that I’m pregnant with something big, something important, four minutes may have passed. Four minutes is not enough for reflection or deliberation. This is proof that all happens in the unconscious.
HH: With this idea of moving into the unconscious, I’d like to talk about moving beyond the conscious self, to the question of the I. Rimbaud wrote “Je est un autre” [“I is someone else”], and last year at the FestivalandCo Literary Festival in Paris, you spoke at length about this idea with author Beatrice Commengé. I think that you embody many, many I’s . . .
AN: Yes, that’s it. I’m a numerous being. I am numerous. [Je suis un être nombreux. Je suis nombreuse.] Writing for me is a descent into myself to a place where I’m entirely porous and where I can let myself be completely penetrated or possessed by all the individuals I could have been in all of humanity. It’s very destabilizing to live through this yourself, and I know that it’s also very destabilizing for many of my readers. It’s something that comes back to me a lot.
I’m a “bestseller,” so I have all sorts of different readers, and among these, some who regularly ask me, “But why have you written this awful book? When I see you, you’re in good health, you look happy, you have a good life . . . Why did you write that?” And I say to them, “You’re absolutely right. There’s no good reason.” Rather, it’s just that I let myself be open to all of that.
HH: Yes, the seed comes and—
AN: That’s it.
HH: And you can do nothing?
AN: Exactly. I can’t do anything.
HH: In The Life of Hunger, you created the neologism “jamaisien” [in French “jamais” means “never”]—denoting someone from the “country of never.” How do you recognize yourself in this idea?
AN: In the whole idea. For me, it’s really a profession of faith. I think that perhaps everyone who has known exile or long-term expatriation can recognize themselves in this profession of faith. I imagine you recognize yourself in it?
HH: Yes, on a lot of levels, and in different ways—as a woman, as a writer, as a foreigner living in France . . .
AN: At the same time there are enormously very fine, wonderful sides to it [this idea of being “jamaisien”.] Right now, I’m in France quite a bit—almost all the time—and every day when I leave my house I say to myself, “This is extraordinary, I’m in a foreign country.” And it’s true this is not my country. I’m living abroad and I feel it. I have all sorts of proof that France is a foreign country. And this makes life much more interesting.
But at the same time, it’s true that it’s also a lack, a deficiency. I suppose that if I’ve never been able to build anything except [constructions] out of words, it’s because of this deficiency.
The place where I live in France—that some would call “my apartment”—is not fit for a normal person. It’s uninhabitable. There are, then, for me, these things lacking. Deficiencies for elementary basic things like this.
HH: Yes, and everyone who is a jamaisien . . .
AN: Absolutely. They all have this trait.
HH: Me, too!
AN: [Laughs]
HH: Your appetite for reading came when you were very young. And for writing, it was when you were seventeen. What is “appetite” for you?
AN: It’s the driving force of life. In The Life of Hunger, I speak of this profession of faith that’s very megalomaniac, “La faim, c’est moi.” [Literally “I am hunger,” a paraphrase of Louis XIV’s dictum “L’état, c’est moi.”] But it’s true that if I had to summarize myself in one word, it would be the word “hunger.” You’ll tell me that everyone is hungry, but for me, I was always hungrier than others.
HH: For . . . ?
AN: For food, books, writing, life. For everything.
HH: And I think that it’s also because you’re pregnant so often and so much that you’re so hungry.
AN: [Laughs] Absolutely. Yes. It’s well known that pregnant women are hungry. . .
HH: And for little whims or caprices . . .
AN: Oh yes, it’s also like that for me, they are caprices or whims. When I’m hungry, it’s for some specific item that’s not necessarily easy to find.
HH: In Tokyo Fiancée, you write, “the worst accidents in life are linguistic.” You play on the double meaning of the word “maîtresse” [which in French can mean either “teacher” or “mistress”], the Japanese notion “to play” [very different than the French literal meaning of “jouer,” to play], and the difficult, absolutely inescapable concept in French of “you”: the informal tutoiement or formal vouvoiement. What is born in the parenthesis between a misunderstanding and the right word?
AN: Nothing is more difficult than finding le mot juste. And in fact contemplation and reflection are not enough.
[In Tokyo Fiancée,] what happens between the first major misunderstanding—the marriage proposal [regarding the two protagonists] that ends up in a huge misinterpretation—and the end of the book [where the two meet up in very different circumstances], is time. It took seven years between these two events.
Nothing replaces the work of time. The biggest discovery in life—and I’m speaking of life in the sense how we live it every day, where each one of us might live, let’s say, maybe eighty years—the biggest discovery in life is time.
Time can appear at first to be the principal enemy. When you’re young, you understand that time is going to go by, pass in front of you, through you. That it will destroy you, destroy your childhood, the things important to you. And it’s true that time destroys a tremendous amount of things. And to survive this is very difficult.
I remember when I was fourteen I declared that time was the worst enemy of all. And that . . . well . . . and that now, looking down from the heights of my great age, I don’t think it’s as easy as that. Yes, time is an enemy, but it is not just the enemy, time is the main, essential discovery we can make in our life, beginning with the moment where you discover this other dimension of it.
You know who your friends are after twenty years. It takes twenty years of friendship with someone to know the worth of friendship. And this, nothing can replace. Not even the most beautiful words or the most important promises—all of that is worth nothing. It is only time that can say if it’s a true friendship.
So what enables you to find le mot juste is time.
HH: Mark Twain said, “humor is tragedy plus time.”
AN: Brilliant! That’s exactly it.
HH: The humor in your books is subtle and hidden, but an essential presence. What is humor for you?
AN: For me, humor is distance. Time is distance, of course. [Pauses] A tragedy occurs and how do you survive it? Humor.
HH: You were just talking about the value of friendship and how it plays out over time and, I’d like to add, over distance. In so much literary history, friendships were first and foremost epistolary. And I think that you’re a prolific letter writer—
AN: Oh yes! Have you seen these? [Gestures behind her desk to piles and stacks of letters.] You have the proof all around you!
HH: I imagine that a good portion of your time is dedicated to answering these, the letters and mail?
AN: Yes, absolutely. With correspondence, there are many, many different ways and kinds and I maintain thousands of correspondences.
There again, the only thing that gives the key to a particular correspondence is the long term. I have a large number of rapid correspondances éclairs. But unfortunately, these are the least interesting. And although there are sublime letters in this kind of correspondence, if it doesn’t give something back to you or lead to something longer, you don’t learn a lot from it. The most fascinating correspondences are those that spread out over ten, fifteen years. The key is patience because it’s assumed that you’ve passed by a very large number of boring letters. Inevitably. But one has to accept boredom. Boredom is part of communication.
In Japan, these are things that you learn. A letter must include a first paragraph devoted to the climate. By definition, this is not too interesting. But, that’s not a problem. And little by little, one ends up by finding this interesting, too. And a person becomes really interesting when you’ve known them for a long time.
HH: How is it that you have so many young readers who are letter writers, instead of e–mailers?
AN: They know that there’s no other way to do it. If it’s not a letter on paper, I won’t accept it, I won’t read it, and I won’t respond to it. It’s fabulous and I receive brilliant letters from very young people and often, not always, but often, these correspondences last a long time. And continue. When a person is sixteen years old and continues writing letters to me when they’re thirty, I still write back to them.
HH: Do you think you’re a big inspiration for teenagers and young people?
AN: It really varies. Sometimes yes, I’m a big inspiration, sometimes I’m less significant [to them] but nonetheless important in some way.
I know, for example, that many teenagers—and it’s something really strange because nothing prepares you for this—tell me, “I need an adult to look up to. A guide, because I don’t have one. I don’t like my parents, I despise them, they’re stupid.” And I can tell that they’re choosing me as this adult. What responsibility! Can you imagine that?
What’s more, I don’t feel too gifted for that and at the same time, it’s difficult to say, “No, I refuse to be the adult you look up to,” so you have to try and play this with a bit of distance. And you really have to pay attention and be careful even more so with adolescents, because a little thing [can be mentioned or said] and, voilà, for them it’s passion, love . . . You have to find the right distance and it’s very difficult.
HH: You spoke about memories, the act of remembering, and that although memories can be very convincing, for you it’s in the fact and act of writing them down that memories become reality. How is this metamorphosis for you?
AN: It’s always astonishing. Staggering. And particularly so in the case of my autobiographical books. Because in the framework of my fiction books, it seems natural that it’s in the act of writing about the thing [the idea, the situation, the character, etc.] that gives it its reality.
And it’s also the case in my autobiographical books. However, when it’s a question of specific memories, of memories I remember perfectly well when this particular thing happened to me, it’s still as if it really only happens when I write about it.
I imagine it’s not like that for everyone in the world, but for me, that’s how it is. Even if I recall everything about a particular memory, somewhere there’s a deficit or lack of reality in the thing itself and this cannot be compensated except by writing.
There’s the extraordinary phrase of Virginia Woolf that perfectly summarizes this infinitely mysterious phenomenon: “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.” It’s incomprehensible and yet I live it every day. It’s the truth.
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