“Closure” in Amélie Nothomb’s novels

Why choose to give a novel two endings? This is the umpreenth challenge thrown down by Amélie Nothomb. The cynical irony and the provocation, sometimes perverse, regulate the amused tone of her paradoxical stories. Selected titles, such as Le sabotage amoureux or Métaphysique des tubes, like the tragicomic characters, are already helping to create a panoply of themes rather unusual that the author runs through a general destabilization. Hence the use of a dialogue, similar to the blows of fencing and capable of presenting, and simultaneously to represent the dynamic multiplicity of points of view, thanking also to punctuation used and, in particular, to the quotation marks. Pronominal Games and reversal of roles favor a continuous gap of the starting perspective. Now this position and shift writing throws selfwriting glances to the literature value (in the form of a novel thesis), to the definition of the story, to the function of the author. But, while identifying and amplifying the most significant aspects of these 'theoretical' spaces, Amélie Nothomb dig them from the inside. She builds and destroys at the same time, favoring sliding from what is imagined the real rather than from to the concrete to what is imagined, which produces an effect of disarming surprise. It is in this context that Amélie Nothomb experienced several cases of 'closure', narrative junction, far from structuralist or interactive temptations. The poetry of reflection, with its effects of divergence and convergence (mythological, structural, literary references) supports the latest choices used especially in Mercure (two ends) and in Stupeur et Tremblements (circularity), novels where you can appreciate the forms of sabotage of the story (the presence of target, the role of letters, argumentative spaces) and codes of literary genres and writing (plays the similarities and ambivalence, metalessi). These last fencing shots give games of postures, that characterize a naïve cruelty, the pleasure of parody and parody and circumvent this parody through an internal joke with very funny loophole, emphasizing the singular voice of this “enfant terrible” of the panorama of “extrême contemporain”.