stephane-leblanc, journalist and contributor to the 20 Minutes Books reading group, recommends “Psychopompe” by Amélie Nothomb, published on August 23, 2023 by Éditions Albin Michel.
His favorite quote:
When one feels incapable of thinking worthy of the name, observation remains: here is what the love of birds taught me. »
Why this book?
- Because Amélie Nothomb has no equal to tell her life story, without false modesty or false modesty, an existence that you think you know by heart and yet always reveals its share of surprises.
- Because Amélie Nothomb introduces little-known words. Not only the psychopomp who gives the novel its title, “the one who accompanied the souls of the dead on their journey”, specifies the author, but also the eared nightjar, this bird with “the appearance of a dragon” to which she likes to identify.
- Because Amélie Nothomb knows how to captivate with tiny storiesoften episodes of hers, which we end up knowing by heart, in the long run, but whose details she lets infuse so that we appreciate these adventures as if in weightlessness.
- Because his style, despite his passion for adverbs (“passionately, terribly, abominably”), is similar in its surgical precision to haiku and in its lightness to the literary description of a Japanese print.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot. Amélie Nothomb reviews her life once again, a traveler who dreams of being a bird and ultimately discovers the ability to communicate with the dead.
Characters. Amélie Nothomb, her sister, her father, her relatives, birds.
Places. Japan, China, United States, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos… and then France and Belgium.
The time. From Amélie’s childhood in the 1960s in Japan to France and Belgium in the 2020s.
The author. Amélie Nothomb is an ultra-known Belgian author since the publication of her first novel, Assassin’s Hygiene, published in 1992 by Albin Michel. This is the 32nd novel she has published, but she claims to have written more than a hundred.
This book was read with the little smile of someone who is familiar with the life of Amélie Nothomb but who cannot resist rediscovering episodes told from another angle.
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