His is the revenge of the excluded, of those who have suffered, of the misfits. And, in a way, it shapes the entire work of Amélie Nothomb : the cry (often silent) of those who don't fit in. In his previous novel, Beat Your Heart , Nothomb settled accounts with the mother and now, as if they formed a diptych, he does so with the father in ' Epicene Names ' (Anagram), his book number 27.

'Epicene names' is a cruel tale. Other. This time he has not resorted to reinterpretations of the Charles Perrault classics , such as ' Blue Beard' or ' Riquete el del Copete' (which turned into a counter-current love story with happy end : again, the triumph of two outsiders ) . This time Nothomb writes a contemporary fable that could remind of Emmanuel Carrère's ' The Adversary ' . His adversary, his monster, is the father: a man who loves neither his wife nor his daughter, ready to destroy various destinies. The touch of fantasy comes from the ' epicens'of the title: those mixed names that can be male or female, such as Claude and Dominique in French, the father and mother who baptize their daughter as Épicènnes . A name that was consecrated by Ben Jonson , contemporary of Shakespeare, in his play 'Epicene or the silent woman ': a comedy in which the protagonist finds the perfect woman, marries her and discovers that the perfect woman is actually a man . No one is perfect, who would say that.

Once again, Nothomb places the reader in a girl's point of view, the most lucid in history. "The time of childhood obeys other laws," he writes. And from an innocent look, which soon realizes that something is wrong, a perfect family is observed? Here Nothomb does use the typical Perrault strategy: behind the apparently kind, naive, lies the horror, the wicked. And he builds it with his style of short, direct, fluid phrases. A stylistic simplicity achieved through endless sleepless nights: "I am sleepless and at night I attack the text and brush it, review it and brush it ... Removing is quite an exercise," Nothomb recounted during the presentation of his book in Paris, at the 2017 rentrée , with one of its eccentric hats and dressed in rigorous neo-Gothic black. "I like to use the words like nitroglycerin," he added.

A nitroglycerin that summarizes in just two lines, with the favorite story of Épicènnes before going to bed: the one in which his father is hit by a truck while crossing the street and in which a policeman comes to announce to mom that dad is dead. The girl grows up between love and hate , between two revenges that she doesn't even know exist (and one will be executed by her).

' Epicene names' completes the Nothomb mosaic by repeating some of his obsessions, such as the inevitable scene with champagne ("be suspicious when an unknown invites you to expensive champagne", he recommends), his pneumatic word-cameo (the strain in all his books) or one of those end to hold your breath. In France, he will publish his novel number 29 esta rentrée in what has already become a ritual of Gallic letters: every September since 1992 he publishes a book in Albin Michel. Another Nothomb.

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