The Epicene names, of Amélie Nothomb

Epicene names
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With that point of literary androgyny, the ambivalence of some names serves to Amélie Nothomb to establish existentialist paradox adorned with that fabled aspect in which this writer moves so pleasantly.

And so we look at the love of Claude and Dominique and the fruit of a girl who will not find in her father the person that everyone says parents are.

Because Claude feels impelled by other needs greater than the triviality of a parenthood, only an unacceptable consequence of his procreative purpose. Man, for him, bears the legacy of increasing the species, of extending the work. And he can't waste time on minutiae like parental cuteness.

Épicène, the girl, grows up with that lack for her that is difficult to overcome, a generator of internal pain and a scab of skin on the outside. And all that moves her is an idea of ​​revenge with the world, of unfocused hatred.

In the absences there is always more regret than love resides in those who remain. It is the fate of the human, to appreciate more the lost, the non-existent, the snatched. So in the melancholic passage of Épìcene we will find the human being who is obfuscated towards that perdition of the impossible.

The question was to give it the most metaphorical touch of the fabulous, that allegorical and transcendental point of symbols. And Nothomb finds the way to match fantasy with reality, in that strange and at the same time fascinating hybrid that even today offers us readings with a thousand flavors.

Nothomb explores with his usual sagacity the complex father-child relationships and the resentments of unrequited love. And he does so by building a kind of perverse contemporary fairy tale, a cruel fable, narrated with conciseness, precision and forcefulness.

You can now buy the novel «The Epicene Names», by Amélie Nothomb, here:

Epicene names
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