2023-08-30 20:00:05
The writer Amélie Nothomb, in March 2023. ARNAUD MEYER/LEEXTRA VIA OPALE
Shortlisted for the “Le Monde” Literary Prize
This is undoubtedly the most personal text of Amélie Nothomb, the most risky too. With Psychopompethe novelist delivers a “avian autobiography” in which she proclaims her love of birds to make the flight but also the fall the obsessions that have always set her in motion. She defines style as the set of techniques that an author develops to “to prevent his sentence from sinking”. Above all, she returns to several episodes where she herself almost collapsed, literature then becoming this force which allows us to stay a little above the void.
You write that the bird is “the key” to your existence. Why did you wait for this thirty-second novel to celebrate it?
Because it took me a long time to realize it. First, it took the aggression of my 12 years and my period of anorexia: that was my first experience as a psychopomp. At that time, I killed someone inside me and brought back the remains, which are before you today. Then I had to start writing, and just as it took three hundred million years for the dinosaur to start flying, it took time for my writing to feel like something. Recently I posted ThirstyThen Premier sang [Albin Michel, 2019 et 2021] : people told me that I had written the son and the father. All that was missing was the Holy Spirit, that is to say the psychopomp, who is generally represented by a bird.
You just alluded to the rape you suffered when you were 12, in Bangladesh, where your father was an ambassador. In your book, you devote lines to it that are both brief and metaphorical: “It was then that the hands of the sea took hold of me”… Is this a way of protecting the singularity of what you have experienced?
The first time I spoke about it was in 2004. The reactions had been either absent or abominable. A gentleman said to me: “I’m disappointed, give me the details. A very eminent literary critic said to me, “If it’s not true, it’s found.” “Today, we are in the world after [#metoo]. I don’t know if this world is better, but at least we know we don’t say such things. And, for me who comes from the world before, these few lines are already huge. I am at the end of my strength, at the most to say. If I said more, I would describe pain, and painful writing, I cannot. When I was little, suffering was something we didn’t talk about at home. Suffering was rude. This aggression, I remember it very well, I have the memory and the sensations, but at the time it was not the subject of any comment, it was struck with unreality. The witnesses remained silent, except my mother, who said: “Poor child. It’s not much, but for years it was the only guarantee that the attack had taken place. In the 2000s, my shrink told me: “You know, your testimony is enough”, and that was a very important word. I would never have believed that I was a reliable witness.
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