It can't be easy to write a book about childhood. Especially one's own. What a blurry, colourful & complex segment of life it is, how on earth to impose structure and order on such a bubbling pot of heightened, vivid experience and irrational emotion. Without mentioning the added complications of recounting with honesty one's own childhood, in light of or despite the current self, without veering too far towards the extremes of either romanticisation or self-loathing, vis-a-vis one's former self, the two tendancies I find myself adopting alternately when considering my own early years.All things considered, I think Amelie Nothomb makes a commendable effort in this direction. What is clear - and this much we have in common - is that the neurotic adult is the extention of an extremely neurotic child. Except in childhood, it's not regarded as neurosis, or obsessive compulsive behaviour, or any such mental disorder - all the irrational behaviour, the idiosyncracies - it's all just categorised under the umbrella term "childhood". And as such, protected by the purity and freedom from adult concerns or labels that the term implies. But I have always been convinced that many children are highly neurotic, and perhaps Nothomb finds herself at the upper end of the spectrum. The title of a book is at once a reference to the her later experience of anorexia, but also to an impulse that characterised her childhood from its very beginning - a hunger, applied to everything from love and devotion to knowledge and experience, an all-encompassing, monstrous hunger for life itself, manifested in a general approach to the world as well as in specific displays of compulsive behaviour - like binging on water, for instance. Behaviour that among adults is regarded as pathological but among children is far more innocuous and less taboo. It is the behaviour of an individual with irrational, addictive tendencies, and zero acceptance of the notion of natural limits of any kind. In the child Amelie, it is quite accute, and perhaps indicative of an individual who was and still is exceptional in her impulses towards creation and passion. But I don't believe many children can be entirely devoid of these tendencies and indeed that perhaps this is then the norm, much more so than among adults - who by then have learnt to socialise themselves into "normal" behaviour. Perhaps it is just this freedom that provokes the neurosis, the freedom from feeling one ought to think as other people think, and do as they do. The freedom from being too well-acquainted with the model of the acceptable, average individual, with with we can always compare ourselves if ever suspecting we might be straying too far towards the edges, straying into the margins of eccentricity.
It is the incremental acquiring of this realisation that curtails our childhood spirit. But not only this. Amelie Nothomb speaks of always knowing, since her earliest consciousness, that somehow, growing up would mean a "decroissance" - which I can only translate as the opposite of growing up - that is growing down, or shrinking. It refers to "a perpetual loss" - of everything. Of abilities, of imagination, of confidence, of everything. I have always felt a similar sensation throughout my own childhood. That as I grew older, I didn't get better at anything - quite the opposite. My capacities were dwindling, in every regard. But maybe that's simply an illusion, and represents the confrontation with one's own limitations that inevitably occurs at some stage. But I can't help feeling that anything I might have aspired to acheiving in my life - writing a book, mastering a sport, inventing an entirely novel concept, coming up with a ground-breaking formula, learning a language perfectly - I would have had to do in my childhood, because now it is too late. Those capacities are deserting me, if not vanished entirely. There is some truth in it, of course. Anyone who is utterly brilliant at anything, in a seemingly effortless and natural way - invariably began their activity, whatever it may be, at the earliest stage of childhood. It is a window for brilliance that can never be recaptured. And this is why growing up is in fact a decreasing of every skill, every talent, every ability one might possess. It takes us further and further away from that moment. When considering my own childhood self as posessing universal mastery (at least the potential of it) in anything I cared to turn my hand to, I am of course adopting that first tendency of the two I mentioned above - the idolisation of the former self-child. And I think Amelie Nothomb is on occasion guilty of this as well. Clearly she hold in very high esteem her childhood self, sometimes described in such a way that makes one wonder whether any child, even one as gifted as she, could ever possess such brilliance and finesse. But maybe I am under-estimating her.
This self-mythologisation is countered I suppose with her own typically graphic and often stomach-churning account of her descent into anorexia, to the point of experiencing an out-of-body brush with death, when the self-inflicted condition was its most aggravated. It is with apparent dismay at the magnitude of her own capacity towards self-destruction that Nothomb recounts her own physical decline, in a narrative that emphasises cruelty and suffering and evokes disgust - also elements that are rarely missing from any of her works.
The condition appears to be the result of the brutal rupture that occurs between childhood and adolescence, that can often be a patch that is agonisingly difficult to traverse. Nothomb alludes to it in terms of the addition of "a new voice" ("l'addition des voix nouvelles qui se melent au recit interieur") - which are mingled with the internal dialogue, the inner narrative. And it is not a kind voice. It is harsh, shrill and above all judgemental. It is the introduction of a horrifying new concept of reality, and the loss of the childhood licence to be eccentic from which one can only draw benefit from until a certain age. Especially for the most neurotic of children, this transition is extremely painful. It is a change which occurs from an internalisation of external circumstances and voices, which is adopted by the child over time, almost inperceptibly, until it has wormed its way in and then proceeds to turn on its host with the full force of its virulence and merciless, unforgiving judgement. But of course by this stage the damage is done, it can no longer be extracted.
Amelie Nothomb has an absolutely stunning mastery of her language. It's a joy to read, or rather to let the words in the phrases wash over you. Even the words whose exact significance escaped me I could appreciate for their sound and shape and rhythm - it is really as if every word has been meticulously chosen and is invariably perfect - never a single one is jarring or out of place. What is sometimes jarring though no less poetic in its own way and certainly original, are Nothomb's sometimes surprising associations - putting together concepts which one usually wouldn't expect to find in the same sentence, inter-weaving the material and metaphysical worlds for example, and these are sometimes the moments which provoke that emotion that seems to be her most favoured, and the one which she does like no other author I've read - disgust. For example, her assertion that "The brain is composed essentially of fat. The most noble of human thoughts are born in fat." It is this uncanny ability to subvert the noble and the lyrical, even of her own sentences, and to twist it into a different, unexpected shape, that is for me the staple of Nothomb's style, and really marks her out from other francophone authors who are also doted with a wonderous way with words.
And lastly, another point in common - Quite late in the book Nothomb asserts that "of all the countries that I have lived in, Belgium is the one I have understood the least. Maybe that's what it means - to be from somewhere: not seeing (not understanding) what it is about."Maybe it is. But if so, Belgium is not the best of examples. I don't know if anyone in Belgium would claim to know or understand what this country is about. I have spent most of my life here and feel exactly the same about it, it is by far the country which I feel I understand the least. Not because I am from here. But because it is not a place which lends itself to being understood - if by that term we mean the process of reduction, simplification, generalisation and abstraction through which we understand the world around us and make sense of it all. And perhaps that is one of the best things about it.
