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According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor did so only with fear and trembling. Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amélie, our well-intentioned and eager young Western heroine, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfillment of a dream for Amélie; working there turns into comic nightmare. Alternately disturbing and hilarious, unbelievable and shatteringly convincing, Fear and Trembling will keep readers clutching tight to the pages of this taut little novel, caught up in the throes of fear, trembling, and, ultimately, delight.
'Concise, philosophical, enigmatic, Nothomb's writing is highly personal and beyond fault ... It is a belated treat that her books are finally being published in the UK.' Guardian When lonely sixteen-year-old university student Blanche meets the dazzling Christa, she is swept off her feet. Christa, who talks freely of her impoverished background in the Eastern Belgian town of Malmedy, claims to work in a bar with her boyfriend, a David Bowie lookalike called Detlev. When Blanche's mother, who finds her own daughter rather colourless, bookish and dull, is also dazzled by Christa though, she soon invites her to stay at the family house. Suddenly Christa can do no wrong and, as Blanche's parents scour their address-books for long-lost friends to invite to dinner to meet the newcomer, their friendship sours and Blanche's already negligible self-confidence goes into a steep decline. With all the characteristics of Ameacute;lie Nothomb's unique fictional landscapes, Antechrista is a funny, dark and revealing journey through female friendship and rivalry.
I lived everything daring those three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China; I was seven years old." So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's critically acclaimed novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim confines of the gated government enclave battling tirelessly against boredom, concocting a fantasy life as rich as her surroundings are bleak. During one of her tours of duty in a war that has broken out in the ghetto between the children of various nations, she encounters a young Italian girl, Elena: beautiful, aloof, disdainful of silly games. The narrator is instantly infatuated and comes to realize the only fight worthy of her attention is shattering Elena's indifference. Provocative, outrageous, and caustically funny, Loving Sabotage recounts a precocious girl's understanding of the struggles and pains of adult life. "
This coming of age novel by the acclaimed Belgian author is “a disarmingly simple yet deeply complex study of a mother-daughter relationship” (The Washington Post). One of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of fiction in 2018 Marie is the prettiest girl in her provincial high school, and dating the most popular boy in town. She is the envy of all her peers—and she loves it. But when she gives birth to Diane, things begin to change. Diane steals the hearts of all who meet her, inciting nothing but jealousy in her mother. This is Diane’s story. Young and brilliant, she grows up learning about life through her relationships with other women: her best friend, the sweet Élisabeth; her mentor, the selfish Olivia; her sister, the beloved Célia; and, of course, her mother. It is a story about the baser sentiments that often animate human relations: rivalry, jealousy, distrust. Revered throughout Europe, Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb has won numerous prizes, including the French Academy’s Grand Prix. In Strike Your Heart, she offers a telling adult fable about womanhood and the mother-daughter bond.
As the daughter of a Belgian diplomat, Amelia Nothomb had an itinerant childhood, ranging from Tokyo to Peking, and Paris to New York. Recounting these formative journeys, 'The Life of Hunger' is both a fictional memoir and an examination of the self."
Ex.: 2nd print.
When Emile and Juliette Hazel move into their new, secluded home to enjoy retirement, their peace is interrupted by the daily visits of the bizarre man who is their only neighbor
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The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. In Amelie Nothomb's new novel, The Character of Rain, we learn that divinity is a difficult thing from which to recover, particularly if, like the child in this story, you have spent the first tow and a half years of life in a nearly vegetative state. "I remember everything that happened to me after the age of two and one-half," the narrator tells us. She means this literally. Once jolted out of her plant-like , tube-like trance (to the ecstatic relief of her concerned parents), t...
An author begins a letter-exchanging relationship with an American soldier stationed in Iraq who excessively overeats to deal with the horrific violence around him.