Amélie Nothomb: "As soon as my father died, he started talking to me"

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It is the first time that

is in Madrid.

She comes to talk about her thirtieth novel, First Blood, which she presented last Wednesday in Barcelona hand in hand with her Spanish translator, the writer Sergi Pàmies.

«It is formidable that they translate it to one, but above all to be translated by Sergi.

What I experience with him I do not experience with any other translator.

He is an extraordinary writer, who has a brilliant relationship with the language and, for mysterious reasons, also with what I write.

He no longer wants to translate other authors, and I feel very honored by that », she assures.

In

, one of the most prolific and popular writers in the French language reconstructs the life of Patrick Nothomb, her father, before she was born.

From his childhood, lived between the wealthy home of his grandparents in Brussels and the decadent castle in the Ardennes of his wild paternal family come down to less, until the

that nearly ended his life in 1964 at only 28 years old , when he was working as a Belgian diplomat in the troubled newly independent Congo and after four months kidnapped by the revolutionary opposition.

It is

, and the result of what she feels almost like a supernatural mediation.

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I have to confess that reading

I've fallen a bit in love with Patrick Nothomb. And rightly so.

My father was an extraordinary man.

Everyone loved him.

In this book I have tried to reflect his voice, which was very particular and expressed his personality very well.

Recreating that voice has been my main asset. Hence Patrick's first-person narration. I wrote this book because my father had died.

He died the first day of confinement.

I couldn't go to his funeral or say goodbye to him.

It was a failed duel.

But as soon as he died, he started talking to me.

A dialogue began in my head that we had never had when he was alive.

I was delighted.

But after six months I wondered if this was normal.

Why was my father constantly talking to me, what did he want?

I deduced that he expected something from me, that he wanted me to write a book about him.

But I wanted something else:

he wanted me to do it by giving him the floor.

That's why

has his voice.

It's not a book about my father, it's my father's book.

Is this possible?

I think so.

I was the third of three brothers and, since I was little, it was said that I looked a lot like my father.

"Amélie is Patrick," everyone said.

It is something that has been with me my whole life.

So when the time came, I said to myself, well, he's dead, but I'm Patrick.

I started writing and I felt my father's voice in me.

He was a me that made perfect sense and seemed legitimate to me.

That is why I suggest that we should all write our parents' book in the first person.

One is stunned to what extent we can be them. Her father's voice sounds so natural that at times it seems that Amélie Nothomb had found the manuscript in a drawer.

If you spoke rather little,

Where does the raw material for the book come from? My father spoke very little, it was not easy to talk to him.

In fact, I learned more about him through my mother's confessions.

It is somewhat paradoxical, because as an ambassador he talked a lot and received many people every day.

But when people left and stayed with his family, it was over, not a word.

I thought I knew my father very well, because we loved each other very much and because I have watched him closely all my life, but at the same time I had the impression that I didn't know him at all.

There were no confessions on his part, especially if there were feelings involved.

On the experience of the kidnapping in the Congo he wrote a very complete book, a political and historical report in which, however, there was no emotion.

It tells of his aborted execution of him at the last moment without any feeling,

which is truly unique and frustrating for me.

I was thinking of the absolutely emotional description of another firing squad survivor like Dostoyevsky, and I tried the same with my father, recreating in a very intense way what he could feel at that moment and during the rest of his life.

All the facts I tell are true, and I know them, but even so it is a work of fiction because my father's feelings and emotions are the result of the imagination. The book seems like a diptych in which the coldness of the mother and the Hardships in the ruined castle of the Nothombs, although lived with joy, seem to prepare the boy Patrick for the terrifying rigors that he will suffer during his captivity in the Congo. In that castle he was very happy but in very difficult circumstances.

He was very hungry and was tortured by the rest of the children in the house.

So when he was kidnapped he was somewhat prepared for brutality and danger.

On the other hand, my father, because of the education he had received, never recognized suffering or pain.

When he talked about his childhood, he presented it as something terribly happy, and he said that the kidnapping experience was the most formidable thing that had happened to him in his life, even though many people were murdered around him.

But he presented it as an extraordinary adventure. You are very selective with his work.

He writes a lot and then chooses.

I understand that this book satisfied him as a literary work and also as a resolution to his mourning. It was obviously a matter of resolving that duel, and it did not seem to me incompatible with literature.

In the end,

what is literature?

It is a particular use, we could say that it is sacred, of the language.

And I needed to resort to that intense, powerful and sacred function of the tongue to get out of my duel.

But I also felt that my father needed it.

When I handed the book over to my publisher, my father stopped talking to me.

I felt that he was satisfied, that he had gotten what he wanted.

Then a strange thing happened.

My father was not a well-known man, but he had a certain notoriety in Belgium.

When the book was published, Belgian television pulled the archive and an interview appeared in which they asked him about me.

He replied that he was very proud of his daughter, and that his biggest dream was for her to write a book about him.

I didn't know, he had never told me, but there was the book.

Dream come true, dad.

She assures that writing is a vital need that frees her from her demons. I think we are all receptacles for various voices, some toxic and others not, like my father's, which is a good voice.

In any case, I did well to write this book.

Not only because of everything I have just explained, but also because during the process I understood why my father had a third child, which was me.

I knew the facts, I knew that he had been kidnapped, that he almost died, and that after that I was born, but I had not understood that that was why I was born.

Because my father escaped death at the last second and was imbued with a deep vital instinct.

He decided to do something with that instinct and it was to have a third child.

So I was born from that concentrate of life and death.

And I had to write this book to find out.

Literature as a source of a higher truth. literlit That's right.

It was an awareness.

They were things I should have known, and perhaps knew subconsciously, but had never come to my awareness.

Now I know and it is very important to me.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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