Author: Amelie Nothomb
Translator: Namju Kim
Publisher: Munhaksegyesa
Hardcover / 175 pages.
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
The Book of Proper Names is set in contemporary Paris, its main character an
orphan named Plectrude. Before the child's birth her nineteen-year-old mother
shoots and kills her nineteen-year-old (and somewhat feckless) father because
she hates the names he's devised for their child--she fears they will doom their
unborn child to mediocrity. The mother confesses openly to what she has done,
and why. She is arrested and thrown into prison, where she gives birth to the
child, names her, to everyone's bafflement, Plectrude--an obscure saint, and an
albatross of a name--and then hangs herself.
The novel therefore begins on the borderline between tragedy and absurdity, but
as Plectrude grows--raised by a loving, indulgent, and eccentric aunt--it
becomes a deeply moving and simultaneously chilling portrait of girlhood.
Plectrude's great gift turns out to be for ballet, and she throws herself into
dance as if her life depended upon it. Few novels have shown us the implacable
and unforgiving world of ballet with more intuitive sympathy, yet also with a
keen-eyed assessment of the true price of artistic perfection.. Inevitably, the
doom hovering over Plectrude's life from birth returns to haunt her, and in the
end she learns to survive in the only way she knows how--by committing an act of
deadly self-preservation her mother would have perhaps understood best.
The Book of Proper Names is vintage Amelie Nothomb--alternatively mordant and
poignant, a portrait of adolescence that is fierce and funny at the same time.
There is nothing mediocre either about Nothomb nor her creations.
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