This is definitely my favourite Nothomb yet - wicked sharp and very funny ("I was right in the middle of a mental defenestration when a new drama erupted"...hah! Although the sentence probably needs to be read in context...), and the lightness of her touch is as delightful as in Loving Sabotage and The Character of Rain, if not more so.
It seems that most if not all of Nothomb's books are quasi-autobiographical, and this one features 'Amelie-san' as an adult protagonist, completing a 12-month contract with a Japanese corporation, Yumimoto (a made-up name, she drily assures us) during which she commits various transgressions (including that of being too capable in her role), falls in love with her beautiful immediate superior (the dynamic there is just too fascinatingly perverse to be summarised), and spirals ever more bizarrely lower in the unforgiving employment foodchain, philosophically dealing with daily humiliation and the mysteries of the Japanese workplace culture. I can't quite pin down what it is that I particularly like about Fear and Trembling as compared to the other two, but I think that it has a lot to do with that lightness - it's so deftly written (right up to a perfectly judged ending), so wry and so wide-eyed, its worldview so subtly distorted, and the endless misfortunes that befall Amelie met with such unlikely-yet-completely-plausible equanimity on her part, that one can't help but fall under its spell.
