The novelist signs a poignant and intimate work where fiction and reality merge, drawing up the overwhelming portrait of her mother and a childhood in resistance.
As every year since 1992, the Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb publishes her new novel at the end of the summer, on the occasion of the literary school year: So much the better (Albin Michel) is in bookstore Wednesday August 20. After mentioning his father in two recent works, Premier sang (2021) et Psychopompe (2023)the RENAUDOT prize winner in 2021 tells here the story of another member of her family until then ever mentioned.
More So much the better is not a biography, it is a novel. We discover the young Adrienne, four-year-old daughter in the early 1940s, living a difficult summer with her bad maternal grandmother, Bonne-Maman de Gand. The latter terror her little daughter, which she forces to re-turn her vomit after she has eaten with disgust of herring vinegar at breakfast. Adrienne is found with “This monster” facing “The evidence of his loss”. Only one term, saving, then comes to her mind, that she constantly repeats like a mantra: so much the better.
The endless summer becomes more pleasant when the little girl discovers, hidden, the one who reigns supreme at Bonne-Maman: tire, the cat. From then on, seeing the tenderness of Adrienne in front of the animal, the wicked grandmother softens and loosens her embrace. But if there is one person who would not have reacted the same, it is Astrid, mother of Adrienne and daughter of Bonne-Maman. The latter hates cats, memories of her unhappy childhood where her mother preferred to feed the animals that taking care of her daughters. This injury turned into a hatred of the felines. Once back in Brussels, Adrienne realizes that cat cats mysteriously disappear. From then on, the little girl suspects her mother …
History, which paints the portrait of Adrienne from his childhood to his adult life, is above all a matter of double identity. Each character has two versions, two pendants of his personality. Ghent’s grandmother is hard with her family but sweet with her cat, when Astrid, the mother, is pleasant with Adrienne but very wicked with her other daughters and animals. Adrienne also lives duplication, necessary to adapt to difficult situations.
This change in behavior, this joy despite everything, is expressed through an idea: so much the better. This double of so much the better allows him to continue to love the people who hurt him, the situations that hurt her. It is not that she lies to herself, it is adaptation, survival.
“So much the better. It’s inexpiable. So much the better. So much the better did not consist of veiling the face but making life triumph, vitality. So much the better.”
Amélie Nothomb“So much the better”, page 109
His parents have lovers they do not hide and do not love each other: so much the better. His mother kills cat cats, even Bishop the beautiful cat of his best friend Margareth: So much the better. The only distraction authorized to her Bonne-Maman, a wooden spoon named Maïzena, cannot come with her to Brussels at the end of the summer: so much the better. Mantra implacable, Adrienne surmounts everything.
Ode to acceptance, resourcefulness and independence, Amélie Nothomb’s new novel is like a long love letter to this little girl, Adrienne. The dialogues are licked and perfectly characterize the colorful characters, with the war inside the walls, but also outside, the German soldiers running in the Belgian streets.
Adrienne’s feelings are so pure, so shrew explained, that half of the novel came, a doubt interferes: and if So much the better was not a fiction, but reality. The idea is still a little more with the penultimate part of the novel, dealing with the nascent love of Adrienne for a young man, who is shipped in just a few pages.
The novel gets carried away, to the point of rupture. Amélie Nothomb, in a last part written in the first person, reveals the deception. The story of Adrienne is in no way invented, it is the life story of the author. Only the name has been changed. His mother, which was nicknamed “Madame so much the better”, died on February 11, 2024 at 86. Initially incapable of talking about this loss, it was years after the author decides to evoke the one who replied, a day when little Amélie was expecting a declaration of love from her mother: “Seduce me.”
The novel then sounds like a declaration and a magnificent tribute which affects in the heart. The life of Adrienne, spent from fiction to reality, takes on another dimension and becomes more beautiful, more powerful. So much the better.
“So much the better” by Amélie Nothomb, Editions Albin Michel, 216 pages, 19.90 euros.
Extract : “What the child had discovered about her mother had a name she was unaware of: duplicity. Mom was double, part of her escaped her. To join her in such dark regions, an identical phenomenon happened in her; another arose that she would never know, that she would never meet. (page 82).
