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Le Crime du comte Neville

Amélie Nothomb

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Feb 14, 2022 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-star, europe-belgium, author-white, a-reviewed, author-woman, in-french, zchallenge-eu, z-challenges-2022, z-read-gelesen-2022, zchallenge-readtheworld22

I am so pleased I read a book in a foreign (to me) language! And this is the ideal book: only 150 pages, generous margins, large typeface and a clear prose style with short sentences. The blurb on the back contains the following endorsement: "Une clarté d'expression qui fait mouche" by a certain Isabelle Potel. I'm not 100% what 'mouche' means here but there is certainly a 'clarté d'expression' throughout this novella by Belgian woman author Amélie Nothomb.

The very first sentence plunged me into I am so pleased I read a book in a foreign (to me) language! And this is the ideal book: only 150 pages, generous margins, large typeface and a clear prose style with short sentences. The blurb on the back contains the following endorsement: "Une clarté d'expression qui fait mouche" by a certain Isabelle Potel. I'm not 100% what 'mouche' means here but there is certainly a 'clarté d'expression' throughout this novella by Belgian woman author Amélie Nothomb.

The very first sentence plunged me into the delicious world of foreign-French-reading, with its nested subjunctives of the sort I used to drill into my sons for extra points on their high school French exams.

"Si l'on avait annoncé au comte Neville qu'il se rendrait un jour chez une voyante, il ne l'aurait pas cru."

Wonderful, those irregular verb forms, that reflexive verb, the gender marker of the participle, the ne-pas structure of negation. These are the delights of reading 'foreign' as one experiences language not as a transparent window onto plot / characterisation / atmosphere / whatever, but as a Thing in its own right that makes one slow down, as if walking through thick undergrowth in a forest, not along the smooth asphalt path of fluency. Of course, if the foreign undergrowth gets too thick, it stops being pleasurable and starts to be an impenetrable thicket but this didn't happen for me here. I understood most of the vocab, and the rest was almost all available in my torn apart, zerfleddert school French-English dictionary from 1979. And all the while I felt pleased and proud to be doing my bit for international understanding and the undermining of Anglophone entitlement.

But then (if the book is good enough, and this one is) there comes the moment when one ceases to read in-foreign and just reads the book. That is a lovely moment. At one point, I stopped looking up words (and it's a great thing to learn: that it's perfectly possible to read a book without understanding every single verb; one gets the gist and often one can guess at the meaning from context or from some sort of onomatopoeic resonance or, in the case of French, a common Latin root with English) -- anyway, at one point, I stopped looking up words because I was just hurrying to read on. And for the last few pages, I actually hid the page with my hand because the suspense was building and I didn't want to know what was going to happen.

This is a wicked little story, 'hintergründig', as German would say, and even Kafkaesque. And it is resonant with a lot more than the surface of its narrative. The main character, the comte du Neville (who, gratifyingly, is 68 and so addresses my challenge of reading as many books as possible this year with characters over 60) is an aristocrat and muses on the nature of aristocracy. It is the days before the annual grand "garden party" (reminiscent of parties in Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield), and appearances are paramount for the impoverished nobility of Belgium. There is a hilarious line where the comte's daughter points to an example from ancient literature, and the comte dismisses this: they were not Belgian! I don't want to spoiler but the whole aristocracy dilemma comes to a head in a painful way that actually, quite movingly, addresses love of sister, love of daughter, conflicting emotions towards one's father, generational gap, depression, and the burden and joys of tradition. This list may sound grim and ominous but this book is a fun read.

There is a lot of dialogue which adds to the ease of reading in-foreign.

Excellent. I may pursue more by this author. Also, very happy to be reading a book from the EU, a permanent post-Brexit challenge to self. What could be more EU than the country of Brussels? (Except Luxembourg. I read a Luxembourgian novel last year.)

Challenges addressed: Diverse Reading Challenge, hosted by @bookasaurusbex: 'set in Europe, not UK'. Personal challenge: in French. Personal challenge: EU. Personal challenge: protagonist over 60 (68). And what a great over-60 protagonist he is, may I add. #readtheworld21 challenge by @anovelfamily and @end.notes: #FebruaryinFrance (which I expand to include #FebruaryinFrench). Popsugar Reading Challenge 2022: prompt 'favourite prompt from a past Popsugar'; I'm going to go with Popsugar 2020: 'a great first line'. And I'm so happy to be fulfilling #the52bookclub prompt 'picked based on spine' as I did pull this out of my local Amnesty International bookstore's French-language shelf, based on the many recs I'd seen for Nothomb.

Format: A very pleasant Livre de Poche edition, smooth paper, clear typeface, floppy spine, sort of weirdly compelling cover. ...more

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Jun 11, 2017 Juliane marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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