Character of Rain (original 2000; edition 2004)

This is a book about babyhood and childhood told as if an adult could interpret how a very small child actually thinks, but also giving the child the adult abilities of talking and reading.

I loved the book, not least because it was suitably short, but it turns out that her one, not quite phobia, but absolute real dislike, is also mine, and for the same reason too. I intensely dislike koi, or carp, waiting to be fed with their mouths open and being able to see their disgusting rubbery lips and the smooth pink tube that is their mouth cavity and digestive tract tube.

I think both the protagonist and myself had the same feeling on feeding them for the first time where they crowd up, pushing pushing, to the side of the pond and in their mindless, greedy way open their maws for the crumbs thrown at them. Intimations of our own mortality indeed, wide open mouths and a tube of throat and gullet straight to our stomachs.

Good book though. Worth reading because its nothing like any other book I've ever read and the writing is sensitive and lovely and never belabours a point. Unlike me. So enough. ( )

The Nothombs, Belgian citizens who reside in Osaka, Japan in the late 1960s, give birth to their third child. From all appearances she appears to be a healthy girl. However, unlike her older siblings, she is only a Tube: she eats, digests and excretes, but doesn't move a muscle or interact in any meaningful way with her family or environment. Her parents call her "the Plant", as she requires no more care than a fern. She maintains this vegetative state until she turns two years of age, when suddenly and for no apparent reason she sits up and begins to scream. Her parents are initially overjoyed that "the Plant" has come to life, but are dismayed when she howls uncontrollably and unceasingly for the next six months. The spell is broken by her paternal grandmother during her visit from Belgium; she offers the child a stick of white chocolate, and Amélie comes to life as a sentient being, whose existence is validated by her first experience of pure pleasure.

My full review is in issue 10 of Belletrista: http://www.belletrista.com/2011/Issue10/reviews_11.php ( )

Witty, clever, entertaining and very well written, but it was a mistake to read Biographie de la faim before this: there's simply too much overlap between the two, even though Biographie de la faim technically only starts where this one leaves off, shortly after the narrator's third birthday. You start to wonder whether she is really saying something profound, or just having fun playing with paradoxes.

Obviously, the great advantage of writing very short books like this (apart from making more money than you would if you just wrote one long book) is that you can stop while the reader is still gasping in amazement at the cleverness of your technique. The author gets the benefit of the doubt in a way she wouldn't if we had half a metre of A la recherche des Amélies perdues to struggle through. Probably all to the good... ( )

“In the beginning was nothing, and this nothing had neither form not substance –it was nothing other than what it was.” I read the opening sentence of Amélie Nothomb’s, The Character of Rain (Métaphysique des Tubes), and was hooked. I was not disappointed. Using the belief that children are gods in Japan until age 2 at which time they fall and become human Nothomb constructs a brilliant study of infancy. Deeply autobiographical, like all her work, and deeply philosophical, like all her work, what amazed me most was how completely she captured or imagined the self-preoccupation that is early childhood. Any child will believe it is the center of the universe (and why not an infant must be watched and waited on), and yet the same child will experience “the fall,” the recognition that he or she is not a god, is not the center of the universe. Nothomb’s ability to recognize this essential problem of being a child and tease out of her own experience the joys and pains of existence in a way that is as imminently and entertainingly readable as it is philosophical is where her genius lies. I haven’t read anything like it. ( )

Despite not having read French literature for quite some time, I took up Nothomb’s sardonic and bittersweet quasi-autobiography in the fall and quickly delved into Nothomb’s self-deprecating and delightfully raw stroll down memory lane. In fact, the quasi-fictional heroine’s experiences were reminiscent of my own childhood. Indeed, I was a late bloomer and did not speak well after my third birthday. . . one might say that I was plagued by similar crises of conscience and precocious worry and the mischievous protagonist has reminded me of my introvert younger self. Indeed, such vacuous memories have not visited in so long that it felt so wickedly comforting and full of yearning to share in the tube’s trials and tribulations ( )