...aka "Métaphysique des Tubes" - and not, as it turns out, Nothomb's latest after all. Flew through it, as I did through Loving Sabotage - like that other, it's (a) extremely fluent and a pleasure to read; (b) short; and (c) somehow not entirely satisfying. Related by another quasi-omniscient child narrator, I think that the best way for me to give a flavour of the book is by giving a chronology of its events (going against all university-instilled instincts by scattering unattributed direct quotations willy-nilly):
God is born. She looks like a normal baby, and develops physically like one, but is both immobile and mute - completely inert, affectless and unresponsive to the world. Ingestion, digestion and excretion take place vegetatively, without her being aware of them. For these reasons, she is referred to as 'the Tube' at this stage in her development. At some time around the age of two, an inscrutable mental event occurs and God begins screaming in rage. The rage is born of being shaken from her state of perfect nullity, and realising that objects (toys) are independent of her, that she is not able to exercise her divine prerogative to name all things in the universe due to being incapable of forming coherent speech, and so on.
After some six months of being constantly enraged, God tastes white chocolate. Through the experience of pleasure caused by this, she is born as an individual [here, the narrative voice switches from third to first person], gains the capacity for memory, and ceases to be enraged. She proceeds to dole out spoken words over time for the gratification of her family, seeking the most appropriate words for her first utterances (she already seemingly has a fully-formed comprehension of language, both Japanese and French, in her mind). Much philosophical musing about the nature of language follows. There is a near-drowning in the sea, but she is rescued by a friend of her brother's and reveals some of her facility with language.
In the meantime, more is revealed about her family and nannies, and we learn that in Japan (where these events take place), children are treated as gods until the age of three. Carp appear in the story, she is repulsed by them and their tube-like nature, and, through a parental misunderstanding, is given three as pets and obliged to feed them. Shortly after turning three, overwhelmed by carp-related existential revulsion, she attempts suicide (unsuccessfully).
After that, nothing more happened.
So much for the story. There's a fair amount of philosophical filigree, but it's too vague to be taken seriously (though possibly I just haven't taken the time to really think it through), but the other key thing about The Character of Rain is the writing itself, which has an oblique economy and a pleasing hint of the poetic that unavoidably recalls Jeanette Winterson, although it's somehow both wispier and more matter-of-fact than the prose of that latter. I really don't know why I don't love these books as much as I feel I should - perhaps the swiftness with which I read them doesn't allow them to really sink in or something, or maybe I'm just not in the right headspace at present (I wouldn't be surprised if all the grappling with Derrida had temporarily taken away my ability to appreciate literature)...
