One of the most amazing current feathers is Amélie Nothomb. His previous novel published in Spain, The crime of Count Neville It took us into a singular detective novel with a set design that, when Tim Burton discovers it, will end up turning into a film, along with much of his previous production.
But in her already prolific work, Amélie has navigated a multitude of currents to which she ends up adding shades between the fantastic and the existential, with that paradoxical lightness that this mixture of trends supposedly so far from the creative scale always achieves.
In Riquete el del pompadour we meet Déodat and Trémière, two young souls called to sublimate themselves in their mix, like Perrault's Beauty and the Beast (A story better known in Spain than the title itself referred to in this adaptation).
Because it is a bit of that, to transfer the story to the present, to transform the fable towards its fit in our present time much more sordid than the melancholic and magical memory of the classic stories.
Déodat is the Beast and Trémière is the Beauty. He, who was already born with his ugliness and she, sanctified with the most fascinating of beauties. And yet both apart, far apart, marked by souls unable to fit into a material world from which they stand out at both ends ...
And from these two characters the author addresses the always interesting theme of normality and rarity, of the great eccentricity on the edge of the abyss and the mediocre normality that appeases the spirit while ignoring the soul itself.
The moment in which the reality of the world erupts with force, with its tendency to easy labeling, to the image and to aesthetic repudiation or adoration, is already childhood and even more so adolescence.
Through Déodat and Trémière we will live that impossible transition, that magic of those who know themselves different and who, deep down, can approach from the risk of attracted extremes, the happiness of the most authentic.
You can now buy the novel Riquete el del copete, the new book by Amélie Nothomb, here: