{"id":275646,"date":"2009-12-21T16:30:05","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T16:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/12\/21\/interview-with-amelie-nothomb\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:15:11","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:15:11","slug":"interview-with-amelie-nothomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/12\/21\/interview-with-amelie-nothomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Amelie Nothomb"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Winter issue of Tin House<\/em><\/a> is now available, and includes an interesting interview Heather Hartley conducted with French<\/del> Belgian<\/del> Japanese<\/del> cosmopolitan writer Amelie Nothomb. Hartley’s intro does a great job in pointing out the huge difference between Nothomb’s popularity in the States (despite being published by New Directions, Picador, and Europa, she’s relatively unknown) and her cult-like popularity in France.<\/p>\n

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Every year since the 1992 publication of her award-winning first novel, Hygi\u00e9ne de l\u2019assassin<\/em> (forthcoming in English, as Hygiene and the Assassin<\/em>, from Europa Editions in Fall 2010), Am\u00e9lie Nothomb has published one novel a year, brought out in high style each September during la rentr\u00e9e, when the most sought-after books appear on the French market. Her publishing house, Albin Michel, opens its season with her book launch. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages, including eleven in English, and her awards include the Grand Prix du roman de l\u2019Acad\u00e9mie fran\u00e7aise, the Prix Ren\u00e9-Fallet, the Prix Alain-Fournier (twice), the Grand Prix Jean-Giono, and many others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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She\u2019s a phenomenon in France. In the tradition of Dead heads, groupies called \u201cles P\u00e9plautes\u201d (their name derives from her 1996 novel, P\u00e9plum) devote a good portion of their lives to following Nothomb from reading to reading, attending her lectures, and keeping up with the latest details of her peregrinations. But Am\u00e9lie Nothomb is not French. The daughter of Belgian diplomats, she was born in Kobe, Japan, and spent a large portion of her childhood abroad in China, Laos, Bangladesh, Burma, and back in Japan. Many of these experiences are an integral part of her novels. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And since Tokyo Fiancee<\/em> is a 2010 Best Translated Book<\/a> nominee, it only seems fitting to quote this part of the interview:<\/p>\n

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Heather Hartley: In Tokyo Fianc\u00e9e<\/em>, you write, \u201cthe worst accidents in life are linguistic.\u201d You play on the double meaning of the word “ma\u00eetresse”<\/em> [which in French can mean either \u201cteacher\u201d or \u201cmistress\u201d], the Japanese notion \u201cto play\u201d [very different than the French literal meaning of “jouer,”<\/em> to play], and the difficult, absolutely inescapable concept in French of \u201cyou\u201d: the informal tutoiement<\/em> or formal vouvoiement<\/em>. What is born in the parenthesis between a misunderstanding and the right word?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Amelie Nothomb: Nothing is more difficult than finding le mot juste<\/em>. And in fact contemplation and reflection are not enough.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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[In Tokyo Fianc\u00e9e<\/em>,] what happens between the first major misunderstanding\u2014the marriage proposal [regarding the two protagonists] that ends up in a huge misinterpretation\u2014and the end of the book [where the two meet up in very different circumstances], is time. It took seven years between these two events.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Nothing replaces the work of time. The biggest discovery in life\u2014and I\u2019m speaking of life in the sense how we live it every day, where each one of us might live, let\u2019s say, maybe eighty years\u2014the biggest discovery in life is time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Time can appear at first to be the principal enemy. When you\u2019re young, you understand that time is going to go by, pass in front of you, through you. That it will destroy you, destroy your childhood, the things important to you. And it\u2019s true that time destroys a tremendous amount of things. And to survive this is very difficult.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I remember when I was fourteen I declared that time was the worst enemy of all. And that . . . well . . . and that now, looking down from the heights of my great age, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s as easy as that. Yes, time is an enemy, but it is not just the enemy, time is the main, essential discovery we can make in our life, beginning with the moment where you discover this other dimension of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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You know who your friends are after twenty years. It takes twenty years of friendship with someone to know the worth of friendship. And this, nothing can replace. Not even the most beautiful words or the most important promises\u2014all of that is worth nothing. It is only time that can say if it\u2019s a true friendship.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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So what enables you to find le mot juste<\/em> is time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

HH: Mark Twain said, \u201chumor is tragedy plus time.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

AN: Brilliant! That\u2019s exactly it. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[Via Literary Saloon,<\/a> via Maud Newton.<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Winter issue of Tin House is now available, and includes an interesting interview Heather Hartley conducted with French Belgian Japanese cosmopolitan writer Amelie Nothomb. Hartley’s intro does a great job in pointing out the huge difference between Nothomb’s popularity in the States (despite being published by New Directions, Picador, and Europa, she’s relatively unknown) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[7116,8886,29496,1646,26056,29486],"class_list":["post-275646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-amelie-nothomb","tag-europa-editions","tag-heather-hartley","tag-review","tag-tin-house","tag-tokyo-fiancee"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322816,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275646\/revisions\/322816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}