“First blood”: in the name of the father

Patrick Nothomb, diplomat and author of In Stanleyville: diary of a hostage taking (Duculot, 1993), died at the age of 83 from a ruptured aneurysm on March 17, 2020. On the first day of confinement. At a time when no one could accompany his loved ones.

Having lent his voice to the Son in Thirst (2019), where she told the Passion of Christ, Amélie Nothomb lends it this time to her father in First blood. Son 30e novel in 30 years. One of his most personal. One of his most moving.

The story begins in 1964, two years before the birth of the prolific novelist, in Stanleyville, now Kisangani, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At 28, Patrick Nothomb believes he will die young, like his father, whom he never knew.

“The twelve men are aiming at me. Do I see my life passing by before me? The only thing I feel is an extraordinary revolution: I am alive. Each moment is infinitely divisible, death will not be able to reach me, I plunge into the hard core of the present. “

After this powerful introduction, Amélie Nothomb revisits the childhood of her father abandoned by her mother, a flirtatious widow preferring social life to motherhood, raised by her benevolent maternal grandparents. The disparaging reflections and keen observations of the boy, as naive as he is ahead of his age, nicely echo those of his daughter in his most autobiographical novels (Metaphysics of tubes, the sabotage in love).

Believing that Paddy, six years old, must harden himself, Bon-Papa decides that he will be entrusted during the holidays to Grandfather: Pierre Nothomb, lawyer, poet and baron. Having no equal to revisit fairy tales (Blue Beard, Riquet with the tassel), the novelist has a big surprise in store for her readers and the kid on the way to the family castle. In fact, it is more on the side of Gothic novels than of Perrault’s tales that she directs the rest of this story, which can only be read in one go, as we empathize with this graceful and charming orphan figure evoking David Copperfield.

“This elegant seventeenth-century building had seen better days. Its beauty, which consisted above all in its location, leaning against the high forest and overlooking the lake, smelled of decay. “

Struggling with his young uncles and aunts, forced into the filthy lifestyle of these penniless aristocrats, Paddy would make little Jane Eyre and poor Oliver Twist cry in compassion. “A tornado of big children invades the dormitory. They seemed terrifyingly numerous to me, so noisy, restless and determined to skim visitors. Raised to seed, thin, violent, clad in rags, the Nothomb children saw me and threw themselves on me like a pack of dogs on game. “

Although she describes miserable living conditions, Amélie Nothomb injects humor, elegance and nobility into this learning story. While she goes back to the origins of her father and highlights the contradictions of the family clan, the novelist seems to make peace with herself and breathe new life into her fictional work.

First blood

★★★ 1/2

Amélie Nothomb, Albin Michel, Paris, 2021, 175 pages

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