There's something about Nothomb's writing that I find very appealing. I don't know exactly what it is - a certain piquancy, a cryptic flavour that creeps in amidst her deceptively simple sentences, more than a hint of the infraordinary...at once matter of fact and riddlingly philosophical, her short fictions seem to inhabit a space and genre of their own.
The premise of Antichrista is apparently (and, given the wild flights of her other books, disappointingly) banal: Blanche, a plain, painfully shy girl, is befriended by her charismatic, exotically worldly classmate Christa, who insinuates herself into Blanche's life and then proves the most vicious kind of 'frenemy'. But the style in which it's written makes the book far more interesting than a simple statement of its narrative would suggest - and it does so in a way that I find delightfully mysterious.
Reading Nothomb always gives me the impression that her writing is imbued with much more of herself than is usual for fiction, even literary fiction...somehow - and this is part of the trick, I suspect - whether that impression is accurate or illusory seems almost entirely beside the point.
* * *
Loving Sabotage
The Character of Rain
Fear and Trembling
The Book of Proper Names
