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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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The Book
of Proper Names by Amelie Nothomb |
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Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Disorder Belgian literary writer Amelie Nothomb’s latest book, The Book
of Proper Names, has been a best-seller in Plectrude’s status had changed in school. She had moved from
pestiferous outcast to adulated best friend. Had she been adored by a clod,
she could have gone on being undesirable. But in the eyes of the pupils, Roselyne could do no wrong. Her sole defect, which
consisted of being a new girl, was but a very temporary stain on her
character. They began to wonder if they hadn’t been mistaken about Plectrude. Of course, no discussions
about this actually took place. The thoughts circulated in the collective unconscious
of the class. Their impact was all the greater for it. Certainly, Plectrude remained a dunce in arithmetic and many other
areas. But the children discovered that a weakness in certain subjects,
particularly when it was taken to extremes, could sometimes have something
admirable and heroic about it. Gradually they came to understand the charm of
subversion. The teacher didn’t. Plectrude’s parents were again summoned. “With your permission, we
are going to have your child undergo some tests.” Denis felt profoundly
humiliated. They were saying his daughter was deficient. Clémence
was delighted: Plectrude was extraordinary. Even if
they detected a mental defect, she would take it as a sign that her child was
one of the elect. So Plectrude
was subjected to all kinds of logical sequences, abstruse lists, geometrical
figures containing irrelevant puzzles, formulae pompously called algorithms.
She replied mechanically, as quickly as possible, in order to hide a violent
to desire to laugh. Was it chance or the
brilliance of instinct? She did so well that everyone was astonished. And
thus it was that within the space of an hour, Plectrude
went from class dunce to genius. “I am not surprised,” her
mother commented, vexed at her husband’s amazement. The
change of termiinology conferred advantages, as the child
soon became aware. Previously, when she couldn’t work out a problem, the
teacher would give her a pained look, and the more hateful pupils laughed.
Now, when she couldn’t get to the end of a simple task, the teacher
contemplated her like the albatross in Baudelaire’s poem: her massive
intelligence prevented her from doing basic adding and subtracting. Her
fellow pupils were ashamed at having so stupidly reached a solution. Given that she really was
intelligent, she wondered why she couldn’t solve easy math questions. During
the tests, she had given correct answers to exercises that were actually far
harder. She remembered that she
had not been thinking at all during those tests, and concluded from this that
the key to everything was absolute thoughtlessness. From that point onward, Plectrude took care not to think when solving a task and
instead wrote down the first numbers that came into her head. The results
weren’t any better, but they weren’t any worse, either. Consequently she
decided to keep to this method, which, by virtue of being just as ineffective
as the earlier one, was fantastically liberating. And that was how she
became the most highly esteemed dunce in It would all have been
perfect had there not, at the end of each school year, been annoying
formalities designed to select those who would be lucky enough to move up to
the next class. This was a nightmarish
period for Plectrude, who was only too well aware
of the role chance played in these events. Fortunately, her reputation as a
genius preceded her: when the teacher saw her results in mathematics, he
concluded that the child’s answers might be right in another dimension, and
ignored the scores. Or else he questioned the little girl about her
reasoning, and what she said left him flabbergasted. She had, you see,
learned to mimic what people thought was the language of a gifted girl. For
example, at the end of a stream of utter gibberish, she would conclude with a
limpid “It’s obvious.” It wasn’t obvious at all
to her teachers. But they preferred not to advertise this fact, and always
gave their student their blessing to move on. Genius
or dunce, the little girl
had only one obsession: dancing. The more she grew, the
more amazed the teachers were by her gifts. She had virtuosity and grace,
rigor and imagination, prettiness and a sense of the tragic, precision and
spirit. The best thing was that
it was impossible not to see that she was happy dancing—prodigiously happy.
You could feel her delight at handing her body over to dance. It was as
though her soul had waited ten thousand years to do just that. Arabesques
freed her from some mysterious inner conflict. She had a sense for the
theatrical: the presence of an audience highlighted her talent,
and the keener the focus upon her, the more intense her performance. There was also the
miracle of her slenderness. Plectrude was, and
would remain, as thin as a figure in an Egyptian relief. Her weightlessness
defied the laws of gravity. Finally, without
consulting one another, her teachers all said the same thing about her: “She
has the eyes of a dancer.” Clémence sometimes
had the feeling that too
many fairies had leaned over the child’s cradle. She worried that Plectrude would attract the thunderbolts of the gods. Fortunately, her other
daughters accommodated themselves to the miracle without great difficulty Plectrude had not encroached upon the territories of her
two older sisters. Nicole was top of the class in science and physical education,
Beatrice had a flair for math and a knack for history. Perhaps out of an instinctive
sense of diplomacy, Plectrude was hopeless in all
these subjects—even in gymnastics, for which her dancing seemed to be of no
help to her. So Denis assigned access
to a third of the universe to each of his children. “Nicole is going to be a
scientist and an athlete, maybe an astronaut. Beatrice will be an
intellectual; her head crammed with numbers and facts, she’ll analyze
historical events. And Plectrude is an artist
brimming over with charisma; she’ll be a dancer or a politician, or both at
once.” He concluded by laughing
loudly, from pride rather than doubt. The children enjoyed listening to him,
because his words were flattering, though the youngest couldn’t help feeling
slightly perplexed, both at these predictions which struck her as vacuous and
at the assurance with which her father made them. Despite being only ten
years old, and not advanced for her age, Plectrude
had nonetheless learned one important thing: that people on this earth did
not receive what was their due. But
being ten years old is the
best thing that can happen to a human being. Especially to a little dancer in
full command of her art. Ten is the most sunlit
moment of growing up. No sign of adolescence is yet visible on the horizon:
nothing but mature childhood, already rich in experience, unburdened by that
feeling of loss that assaults you from the first hint of puberty onward. At
ten, you aren’t necessarily happy, but you are certainly alive, more alive
than anyone else. Plectrude was a knot of the most intense
vitality She was at the summit of her reign over her dancing school, of which
she was the uncontested queen. She ruled over her class, which threatened to
turn into a dunceocracy in which the one most
useless at math, science, history, and geography was the undisputed genius. She ruled over the heart
of her mother, who nurtured an infinite passion for her. And she ruled over Roselyne, whose love for Plectrude
matched her admiration. However, Plectrude’s extraordinary status did not turn her into
one of those stuck-up ten-year-old madams who think they are above the laws
of friendship. She was devoted to Roselyne and
worshiped her friend every bit as much as her Roselyne
worshiped her. Some obscure prescience
seemed to warn her that she might topple from her throne. She remembered when
she had been the laughingstock of the class. Roselyne and Plectrude
had already gotten married
several times, most often to each other. On some occasions they also married
a boy from their class who, in the most fabulous of ceremonies, was
represented sometimes in effigy, sometimes by Roselyne
or Plectrude disguised as a man—a top hat did the
trick. The husband’s identity in
fact, was of little importance. So long as he displayed no unacceptable
vices (piggishness, a squeaky voice, or a
propensity to begin his sentences with, “Know what? . . .“), he was suitable.
The purpose of the game was to create a nuptial dance, a kind of dance-play
worthy of neoclassical drama, with songs whose lyrics were as tragic as humanly
possible. Inevitably, after all too
brief a marriage, the husband got turned into a bird or a toad, and the wife
locked up once more in a high tower with some impossible task to perform. “Why is the ending always
so sad?” Roselyne asked one day. “Because it’s much nicer
that way,” Plectrude assured her. That
winter, Plectrude invented a sublimely heroic game. It involved allowing
yourself to be buried in snow, not moving, and not putting up the slightest
resistance. “Making a snowman is too
easy,” she had decreed. “You have to become a snowman, or else lie
down in a garden under the snow” Roselyne looked at her with skeptical
admiration. “You be
the snowman and I’ll be the one who lies down,” Plectrude
went on. Her friend didn’t dare
voice her qualms. The two girls found themselves beneath the snow, one lying
on the ground, the other standing up. The one standing up soon ceased to see
the fun in all this. Her feet were cold, she wanted to move, she had no desire to become a living monument. On top of
that she was bored because, apart from being statues, the two little girls
had agreed to remain silent. The recumbent figure was
exultant. It had kept its eyes open, as corpses do before others intervene.
It had relinquished its body, parting company with the sensation of
freezing, and from the physical fear of leaving its skin. All that remained
was a face open to the forces of the sky Plectrude’s girlish ten-year—old frame was not present,
not that it would have been much of a burden. The recumbent figure had
preserved only the very minimum of itself, in order to put up as little
resistance as possible to the pale curtain of snowflakes. Eyes wide-open
contemplated the most fascinating spectacle in the world: descending white
death, sent down by the universe as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, of some
single vast mystery Sometimes the eyes
studied the body, which was covered before the face was, because the clothes
acted as insulation. Then the eyes returned to the clouds again, and
gradually the warmth faded from the cheeks, and soon the shroud was complete
and the recumbent figure stopped smiling so as not to spoil its elegance. Fans of experimental literature will be
the readers who most appreciate The Book
of Proper Names. Steve Hopkins,
November 21, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Book of Proper Names.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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