Amélie Nothomb

Amélie Nothomb was born in Japan to Belgian parents, lives in Paris, and writes about the United States' war in Iraq. That's the kind of worldliness I like for an Around the World for a Good Book selection. Nothomb creates a fictional version of herself in this novel (how true-to-life, I do not know) in which she carries on a correspondence with an American soldier in Iraq, Melvin Mapple. The soldier is aware that Nothomb (the fictional one, at least) responds to letters from her readers show more and that she may be a sympathetic voice. Over the course of the letters, Mapple reveals that he and other soldiers react to the war through eating and enormous weight gain. Mapple sees it as a means of protest, forcing the military to pay for food and increasingly larger clothing. As the correspondence continues, the absurdity increases so that Mapple's obesity is treated as an artistic statement. Nothomb creates in herself an unsympathetic sounding board for the pathetic and grotesque Mapple. The book works well both as a satire of American foreign policy and obesity problem, but also is a gripping read with a number of interesting twists. On a literary level it works with the ideas of language and reality. show less

A precocious adolescent would think this was a brilliant and profound book that reveals deep and ugly truths about humanity. As someone whose tastes have matured slightly in the last twenty-five years, I found the book merely brilliant -- an elegantly and satisfyingly constructed and conveyed story -- but not one I would want to read much more into.

The story is almost all dialogue between a terminally ill 83 year-old Nobel Prize winner in literature named Pretextat Tach and a series of show more journalists who are interviewing him. Tach is a physically and psychologically monstrous person -- cruelty and obesity being the least of his problems -- who has lived as a recluse for decades. His personal secretary arranges a limited number of interviews for him when he discovers he has just two months left to live.

Tach makes quick work of his first few interviewers, humiliating them with a combination of his quick wit and cruelty bulldozing its way through their comfortable assumptions. He is generally suspicious, with good reason, that any of them have even read let alone comprehended his impenetrable books.

But the final interviewer -- whose rapid and witty dialogue takes up the second half of this short novel -- turns the tables on Tach, repeatedly getting the better of him. This half of the novel is best read in a single sitting (in my case, it was interrupted by 5 hours of sleep), as the mounting back-and-forth, revelations about Tach, his interviewer, and the culmination of the book, all unfold.

The book would make a particularly good play or movie (it reminded me slightly of Death and the Maiden), although it was hard enough to read the descriptions of the monstrous Tach, I'm not sure what it would mean to actually watch him for two hours. show less

El empresario Jérôme Angust recibe por megafonía el anuncio de que su vuelo sufre un retraso sin determinar. Para matar el tiempo se sumerge en la lectura del libro que lleva en su bolsa de mano, pero un inesperado interlocutor, Textor Texel, le dará conversación a pesar de su manifiesta resistencia. Como se trata de una novela de Nothomb, no sorprende que el inoportuno Texel tenga algo que contar que es mucho más terrorífico, intrigante y sugestivo que cualquier libro: a lo largo de show more su relato, la violación y el asesinato se irán perfilando con nitidez cada vez mayor, y Textor se irá transformando en una abominable encarnación de todos los fantasmas de Angust, quien verá convertida su anodina espera de un vuelo retrasado en una aventura ominosa y alucinante, una pesadilla en la tibia vigilia de una terminal de aeropuerto. show less

Insightful, well-structured, well-written, and ultimately underwhelming. "Strike Your Heart" is the story of a beautiful, emotionally underdeveloped young girl whose careless life choices lead to decades worth of psychological trauma for just about everyone involved. It's up front about being a story of jealousy and, as far as it goes, it's psychologically coherent and its plotting is seamless and economical. The book's events unfold with the terrible, unstoppable logic of a classic tragedy, show more but, to the author's credit, I didn't see all of the plot points coming. The writing itself has a brushed, seamless quality that reads easily but doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance or atmosphere. Again, it's too the author's credit that the characters we meet in "Strike Your Heart" often seem do like real -- or at least believable -- people, even though much of the book feels sort of anonymous. We never learn the name of the French city that Marie calls home, for instance. Furthermore, many elements of "Strike Your Heart" are decidedly non-realist: it's a book in which the internal monologue of a three-year-old sounds exactly like that of a twenty-five-year-old. It's an impressive performance, but it didn't exactly make me love this book.

The problem is that even though they're well-rendered, this novel's character's don't seem to have any existence outside the exceedingly narrow story that the author wants to tell here. "Strike Your Heart" illustrates a psychological dynamic very well, but that's about it. In this sense, it's less a novel than a literary argument, albeit one that's impressively constructed. The entire exercise has a certain dryness to it: this is a novel that refuses to play around with its themes or exceed its narrow prerogatives. Amélie Nothomb's skill as a writer more-or-less wills these characters into existence, but you can't really feel them breathe. So while I can't deny Nothomb's talents, I never really warmed to this one. Perhaps she didn't intend me to. It's on to something else, then. show less