L’Impossible Retour

Amélie Nothomb returns to Japan, where she lived as a child, in the form of an autobiographical notebook of raw sensitivity. This, her thirty-third novel, sets aside the traditional novel form to become a travel narrative, “a ballade in both the musical sense and the sense of a stroll through Japan, which she tells us was the last time she visited. A country that reminds her of her father, and at the same time a novel made very funny by the character of Pep, her friend who is as brilliant as she is unbearable” (Arnaud Viviant, in Le Masque et la Plume, September 22, 2024).