![]() “You have a few obese characters in your books, and the way you portray them they never lack dignity.” “I know that you won’t judge me,” he writes to Nothomb. His fleshy double is named Scheherazade, he has decided, and when he’s in bed he likes to imagine that the female form of Scheherazade is lying over him, rather than his own immensity. Now he weighs 400 pounds: the equivalent, he points out, of carrying around a whole extra person. To anyone familiar with her oeuvre, it makes perfect sense: he has coped with the trauma of combat, of “rocket fire, tanks, bodies exploding next to me,” by gorging on food. She politely writes back, and after a few more letters have been exchanged, Mapple’s reason for choosing Nothomb as a pen pal emerges. “I need some understanding and I know that if anyone can understand me, you can.” No wonder he’s depressed, thinks Nothomb, if he’s caught up in that war, but “it was completely mind-boggling that he would write to me about it.” “I’m writing to you because I am as down as a dog,” he explains. This particular fan, however, piques her curiosity. Reading letters from her adoring public is an everyday task for Nothomb: known to abjure email and reply, by hand, to all epistles, she regularly corresponds with fans. ![]() ![]() Inspired by a USA Today article about the epidemic of obesity among American soldiers in Iraq, Life Form begins with a 2008 letter from Melvin Mapple, a United States Army private stationed in Baghdad. Both “Amélie’s” distinctive cadence of voice and the believably rendered voice of her correspondent are nevertheless captured by Anderson with characteristic precision. But in a new departure for Nothomb, this partly epistolary novel also includes the perspective of a character with whom she has little in common-an American man-thus creating an extra challenge for her longtime translator, Alison Anderson. As usual, we meet a narrator named Amélie, who’s almost indistinguishable from the author. “I need to be very hungry to write.” For her nineteenth book, Life Form, Nothomb has applied her preternaturally original mind to those two favorite subjects-writing and “superhunger”-to create a story that, even by her standards, is astonishing in its wit and grace. “I need to be very hungry all the time,” celebrated Belgian novelist and disordered eater Amélie Nothomb once admitted.
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