Amélie Nothomb, página 4 de 11

La première fois que je me vis dans un miroir, je ris : je ne croyais pas que c’était moi. À présent, quand je regarde mon reßet, je ris : je sais que c’est moi. Et tant de hideur a quelque chose de

« Pour un écrivain, il n’est pas de plus grande tentation que d’écrire la biographie de son assassin. Robert des noms propres : un titre de dictionnaire pour évoquer tous les noms qu’aura dits ma meu

" La faim, c''est moi.

Trabajos absurdos, órdenes dementes, tareas repetitivas, humillaciones grotescas, misiones ingratas, superiores sádicos, la joven belga Amélie, de 22 años, empieza en contabilidad, luego a servir cafes, pasa a la fotocopiadora y, descendiendo los escalones de la dignidad, acaba ocupandose de los lavabos... masculinos.

stunningly funny novel about the gap between East and West, and the story of a young woman who falls straight into it. Winner of the Grand Prix de l''Academie Franç:aise and the Prix Internet du Livre, this taut tour-de-force of a novel created a sensation in France, where it has sold nearly half a million copies. Fear and Trembling tells the story of Amelie, a young Western woman who spends a year working at a Japanese corporation. She soon learns that at theYumimoto Corporation hierarchy means everything. Keep to your place and you survive; break ranks and you will be broken. The determined but hapless Amelie makes mistake after mistake, not least of which is deigning to sympathize with her immediate superior, the beautiful, efficient, and ice-cold Miss Mori. A perverse process of ritual humiliation follows. But even as Amelie''s life at theYumimoto Corporation spirals inexorably and hilariously downward, what she learns about herself and her colleagues in this brilliant novel will alternately delight and outrage readers. Not since Marguerite Duras has a novelist so indelibly marked the differences between East and West, and with such seductive honesty.

Una profunda y original historia que nos sumerge en una sorprendente filosofía.Una criatura sin modelar por la educación de los adultos explica cómo se ve el mundo cuando acabas de llegar. Más curioso aun si tu familia es europea pero la niñera, la casa y el jardin son japoneses. Con gran sentido del humor, nos muestra la falta de comunicacion entre los humanos en un universo en el que las grandes cuestiones se plantean con tanta sencillez como profundidad.

Plectrude is an orphan with a gift for dance. She is looked after by her aunt who falls obsessively in love with her. This is a tale of lost mothers, haunted adolescence and fate. This mind-blowing little fable was a best-seller in France, where Belgian writer Nothomb has a cult following. It''s hard to imagine a postmodern novel in translation achieving widespread popular success here, but the book''s themes--ballet, anorexia, the redemptive power of love--certainly make it more accessible than the works of, say, Haruki Murakami. Nothomb tells the vaguely surreal story of an extraordinary little girl who overcomes a tragic infancy (her mother murdered her father, gave birth, then hung herself) and an unfortunate name (Plectrude) to revel in a fairy-dust-sprinkled childhood. Her age of innocence comes to an end when she enters the Paris Opera Ballet School, a rigorous institution portrayed as a ''scalpel to slice away the last flesh of childhood.'' Eating disorders and their proliferating meanings are major themes, but the detached, slightly elevated prose, interspersed with commentary by the third-person narrator, is sufficiently inventive to avoid the air of a manifesto. Nothomb delivers her main character to the doorstep of adulthood with a cheekily absurdist ending that will jolt fans of experimental literature. Jennifer Mattson

Antéchrista, best-selling novelist Amélie Nothomb’s latest book, is a sharply funny story about the entertaining struggle between an introverted outsider and an extroverted insider. “On the first day