Reading Matters

'The Life of Hunger' by Amélie Nothomb

Fiction/memoir - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 160 pages; 2006. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.

When I read Amélie Nothomb's astonishingly profound Sulphuric Acid last September I was intrigued enough to seek out more work by this Belgian author. I managed to track down a slightly battered second-hand copy of The Life of Hunger and mistakenly thought it would be a straightforward account of the author's battle with anorexia (well, with a title like that you would, wouldn't you?). Instead it's a kind of weird hybrid between memoir and fiction (or, as the Faber & Faber website describes it, an "odd memoir-cum-novel") in which Nothomb tells her life story from the age of four to 21.

This isn't as boring as one might expect, because Nothomb lead a fascinating childhood. Her father was a Belgian diplomat, so she got to live in various exotic places around the world. Indeed, she was born in Kobe, Japan, and then went on to live in China, New York, Bangladesh and Laos.

But the one constant in her life -- aside from her elder sister to whom she feels especially close -- is her hunger which is at odds with her personal affluence:

As far back as my memories go, I have always been dying of hunger. [...] I might add that my hunger should be understood in the broadest sense of the word: had it only been hunger for food, it might not have been so serious. But is it possible only to be hungry for food? Is there a hunger of the belly that is not also a sign of a generalised hunger? By hunger, I mean that terrible lack within the whole being, the gnawing void, the aspiration not so much to a utopian plentitude as to simple reality: where there is nothing, I beg for there to be something.

Reading between the lines I suspect that Nothomb's fierce intelligence lead her to feel, think and experience things more deeply that other people. Indeed, by the time she's a teenager her hunger manifests itself in anorexia, which she welcomes because it "kept me in an ice age in which feelings ceased to grow." She adds: "It was a respite: I stopped hating myself."

(In quite a revealing article in The Independent, published in 2006, she's quoted as saying "I'm totally cured. I eat in a strange way, but I enjoy it. Everything became well when I finally understood that I enjoy being hungry. Normally, I only eat in the evening. It's wonderful. It's like an orgy!")

Unfortunately, any deeper exploration of the disease is absent, as Nothomb skips over her two-and-a-half year battle in just a handful of pages. In fact, much of the book is like this. An incident in the sea when she lived in Bangladesh seems so fleeting, so superficial, I'm not sure what to make of it: was she molested by four men, or was she not?

This floating, dream-like quality to the writing is a double-edged sword: beautiful to read but too vague to interpret factually.

There's also a slightly precocious tone to the writing, and I can imagine that probably reflects what Nothomb was like as a child. (There are, in fact, several references to her early intelligence in the book. But the one that stands out most is a teacher at the French Lycee in New York calling Nothomb's mother to say "Your daughter's brain is overdeveloped. Do you think she suffers?")

On the whole, this is a quirky, somewhat off-beat memoir, one that might mean more to those who have read all of Amélie Nothomb's back catalogue, rather than the single volume I have managed to enjoy. I guess that means I just need to read more of her work... and with at least 10 translated into English I won't be short of choices.

'Sulphuric Acid' by Amélie Nothomb

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 127 pages; 2008. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.

When it comes to satire and parody, reality television seems ripe for the picking. I'm not a fan of Ben Elton but I read his very funny and clever send-up of Big Brother, entitled Dead Famous, back in 2002 when the genre was rather new and exciting, if a little tasteless. But now, six years down the track, reality television is everywhere.

Although the popularity of Big Brother is on the wane (according to this year's viewing figures the ninth series of the British version of Big Brother was apparently the most unpopular series since it started), our TV screens are still filled with endless variations of this rubbish: I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Strictly Come Dancing, the X Factor, Wife Swap et cetera, et cetera.

How refreshing, then, to find a book that looks at reality television and poses the question, what if we created a show that was so utterly tasteless and so morally outrageous, would anyone watch it?

Belgian author Amélie Nothomb seems to think the answer is yes. In her intriguingly titled Sulphuric Acid, first published in 2005, she creates a reality television show like no other in which Parisians are rounded up on the street, thrown into cattle trucks and taken to a TV studio that has been set up to look like a concentration camp. Here, contestants are forced to live like prisoners, deprived of food and basic human necessities, under the watchful eye of the TV cameras. A select few are elevated to the position of kapo (guard) and are encouraged to be aggressive and mean to the prisoners under their "care".

The show, which is called Concentration, is obviously immoral but the ratings are sky high and viewers are hooked on the dynamic between one of the prisoners, the beautiful Pannonique -- otherwise known as CKZ 114 --  and her guard, the despised Zdena, who regularly beats her.

At times the book is almost too horrific to read. It exposes the ease with which people can turn against their fellow human beings, treating them with brutality and contempt as if their lives were totally worthless. But the book also shows the capacity for human suffering and it is perhaps this aspect I found so chilling.

Nothcomb uses this fable to have a pop at the media, too, but ultimately she reserves her most damning judgment for the viewing public.

Concentration won the total audience: one hundred per cent of the population. The programme was watched by everyone, literally. Blind people, deaf people, priests, nuns, anchorites, street poets, children, newlyweds, pets -- even the rival channels had interrupted their schedules so that their presenters could watch.

The politicians sat in front of their sets, shaking their heads with despair, saying: "It's terrible. We should have intervened." [...]

The height of hypocrisy was reached by those without televisions, who invited themselves round to their neighbours' houses to watch Concentration and wax indignant: "When I see that, I'm glad I haven't got a television!"

This is a blackly funny and provocative read, one that makes no bones about condemning our obsession with reality television and the celebrities it creates. It's ultimately very shocking, and some may find it too twisted, too dark, for their liking. Still, it's hard not to admire an author who, in just 127 pages, is capable of packing such a powerhouse punch using nothing more than elegant, bare-boned prose and a strong moral compass.