Fortunately there is the Renaudot! Let’s not sulk our pleasure to see this prestigious literary prize go to Amélie Nothomb, she who did not appear on the first selection of Goncourt. However, we were not the only ones to write that with “First blood” (ed. Albin Michel), a magnificent and brilliant story about her father who died in March 2020, on the first day of confinement, she signed one of the most beautiful books .
The public was not mistaken either wearing it as soon as it was released number 1 in sales. Deemed by some to be too popular, Amélie Nothomb is often shunned literary prizes. She, who has just published her 30th novel, has never received a grand prize. “Let’s be clear, I won’t have the Goncourt,” she confided to us this summer. If I didn’t have it for Thirst, I will never have it. That would have made me very happy, of course, but it doesn’t matter. They consider me to be a successful author and that I don’t need one, and that can defend itself. “
Intimate and powerful and written in the form of a tale, “First Blood” looks back on the life of Patrick, his father, a diplomat with an extraordinary career and a very strong father figure. “A delicate, fragile and modest man, a distant and shy loving father”, according to the novelist, he confided little in his children. Neither on his astonishing childhood nor on this rather incredible episode of 1964, when he was taken hostage for 4 months in the Congo and managed to save his life and that of 1,800 people.
Amélie Nothomb was unable to attend her funeral. She tells us about a pain of rare violence from which she says she will never recover. “I never imagined that I would one day write about my father. He had to die and it was under the effect of the terrible lack that I said to myself, but what are you waiting for to write about him! You know the powers of writing, you know that through writing you can reconstitute it. Go ahead ! She did so well, this novel is a nugget.
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