Hygiène de l’assassin

The young novelist wrote this novel at the age of seventeen; it was published seven years later, by Albin Michel.
It marked the birth of a major talent, and proved a considerable publishing success.

“Amélie Nothomb leads us, with a raging purity and a perverse innocence, into the vicinity of death, and shows us our own face there, as though, in a detective novel, the detective were to discover that he himself is the murderer. And because this strange exploration is conducted with extreme mastery, and one ventures into it as into a horror film, and one discovers, without preamble, in a young woman said to be twenty-five, a murderous humor together with a kind of mysticism of darkness, one savors this uncomfortable pleasure of entering new territory, and what is always, in the end, a writer’s universe: a zone of insecurity.” (Renaud Matignon, Le Figaro littéraire, 20 November 1992).

The very first printing, of only 5,000 copies, was printed in early summer. It appeared in August. Word of mouth and the autumn literary season did the rest, with successive printings of ever-increasing size: within six months, nearly 70,000 copies had been sold.

Review copies were extremely limited for the first printing, and this copy is quite simply the first we have encountered. Boards yellowed at the margins, otherwise a good copy.