Great Female Writers - Moving Away From "Le Petit Prince": Amélie Nothomb

When one is an early learner of French, and trying to graduate from textbooks to real books, there are suggestions that appear again and again. Le Petit Prince is charming and readable, Tintin has an endless back catalogue, and L’Etranger by Albert Camus is every single teacher’s go-to. However, if you want to veer carefully off the beaten track, the Belgian author, Amélie Nothomb, is an excellent choice. Publishing her first book age 26, she has released a book a year (she is now 53!). Her father was an ambassador and she grew up across the world – living in Japan, China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, England, and Laos. As a result, much of her work is concerned with feelings of unease and discomfort with one’s surroundings. Her characters feel out of place because they are new to an environment or strangers to a particular culture. Her most famous book, Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling), is an autobiographical work about her experiences in Japan. The main character, Amélie, is a Belgian girl who works within the prestigious company, Yumimoto, in Japan. Although her career takes a downward turn, Amélie finds a way to survive until her contract expires for just one reason: she does not want to lose face – alluding to the greater cultural hierarchy underlying Japan’s cultural habits in the professional sphere.

For Nothomb, writing is a way for her to make sense of her memories, her past and her present. Often she has no opinions about an experience until the process has begun, she explains. "It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me." One of her novels is particularly apt for students still at school: Antéchrista. This play on words is completely intentional – the antagonist Christa is a modern-day antichrist, scheming and wicked; a teenage girl who makes her friends feel uncool and inferior. Antéchrista is about an unequal friendship between two young girls with different personalities: Blanche is overlooked by everyone and is shy and retiring, while Christa is her opposite, being popular and talented. Christa becomes dominant which begins to annoy Blanche, yet she is not strong enough to reveal this emotion to her friend. Christa even gains the affection of Blanche’s parents, going so far as to take over her bed. Blanche worries that she may lose everything to Christa and she realises she must overcome her anxiety to get away from her friend, Antéchrista.

Nothomb manages to add tension to what could be a cliché storyline about a shy, awkward girl and her domineering, outgoing friend. With dry humour and artful descriptions, Antéchrista is a clever novel that really captures the intricacies and complexities of female friendship and longing. It manages to convey the all too common feeling of being obsessed with your best friend, but also slightly wanting to kill her out of jealousy. For students of francophone culture this is a particularly interesting novel, as it is set in Brussels; a refreshing reminder that people speak French outside of France. It is written in clear, sharp prose, so is ideally suited for those who are just beginning to get comfortable with reading in French.