First Blood

By Amélie Nothomb and Alison Anderson

WINNER OF THE 2021 RENAUDOT PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2022 STREGA EUROPEAN PRIZE
A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK 2023

A moving fictionalized account of Nothomb’s own father, who died of Covid related symptoms in early 2020, this is the acclaimed author’s most personal and heartfelt novel.

The Republic of the Congo, 1964. A young man faces a firing squad, preparing for his last moment on Earth. He is known as a complex and complicated man whose childhood left him hungry for affection and attention and who transformed his emotional wounds into a brilliant career as a diplomat and a negotiator. Now he finds himself negotiating for his own life, together with the lives of 1,500 Congolese citizens.

Inspired by the life of her father and by her lifelong effort to understand him, Amélie Nothomb’s new novel is about life-and-death decisions, about reckoning with one’s past, reconciling with one’s parents, and about the hard, often humorous work of determining one’s own path.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781609458454

Amélie Nothomb

Amélie Nothomb nació en Kobe (Japón) en 1967. Proviene de una antigua familia de Bruselas, aunque pasó su infancia y adolescencia en Extremo Oriente, principalmente en China y Japón, donde su padre fue embajador; en la actualidad reside en París. Desde su primera novela, Higiene del asesino, se ha convertido en una de las autoras en lengua francesa más populares y con mayor proyección internacional. Anagrama ha publicado El sabotaje amoroso(Premios de la Vocation, Alain-Fournier y Chardonne), Estupor y temblores (Gran Premio de la Academia Francesa y Premio Internet, otorgado por los lectores internautas), Metafísica de los tubos (Premio Arcebispo Juan de San Clemente), Cosmética del enemigo, Diccionario de nombres propios, Antichrista, Biografía del hambre, Ácido sulfúrico, Diario de Golondrina, Ni de Eva ni de Adán (Premio de Flore), Ordeno y mando, Viaje de invierno, Una forma de vida, Matar al padre, Barba Azul, La nostalgia feliz, Pétronille, El crimen del conde Neville, Riquete el del Copete, Golpéate el corazón, Los nombres epicenos, Sed, Los aerostatos y Primera sangre (Premio Renaudot). En 2006 se le otorgó el Premio Cultural Leteo y, en 2008, el Gran Premio Jean Giono, ambos en reconocimiento al conjunto de su obra.

Book preview

FIRST BLOOD

"My father’s a big kid I had

when I was just a boy."

—SACHA GUITRY

They take me before the firing squad. Time expands; every second lasts a century longer than the previous one. I’m twenty-eight years old.

Death, there before me, wears the face of the twelve men who will carry out their orders. According to tradition, one of the weapons handed out will have been loaded with a blank. In this way, each of the soldiers has the right to believe he is innocent of the murder about to be carried out. I doubt they will honor the tradition today. None of these men seems to be in need of a possible innocence.

Twenty minutes ago, when I heard them call out my name, I knew at once what it meant. And I swear I sighed with relief. Since I was about to be killed, I would no longer need to speak. I have been negotiating our survival for four months now, four months I’ve spent in endless palavers trying to postpone our assassination. Who will defend the other hostages now? I don’t know, and it worries me, but a part of me is consoled: at last I’ll be able to fall silent.

In the vehicle that brought me to the monument I looked out at the world and began to notice the beauty around me. A pity, to have to leave this splendor behind. A pity, above all, that it’s taken me twenty-eight years of life to become this sensitive to it.

They’ve thrown me out of the truck, and this contact with the earth enchants me: how I love this ground, so soft and welcoming. What a charming planet! I think I could get so much more out of it. But it’s a bit late for that now. I can almost delight in the thought that, a few minutes from now, my corpse will be abandoned here, unburied.

It’s noon, the sun is casting an intransigent light, the air distills maddening smells of vegetation. I am young and full of health, it’s a damned shame to die, not now. Above all, no historic statements: I dream of silence. My ears won’t like the detonations that are about to slaughter me.

To think that I envied Dostoevsky for having stood before the firing squad! Now it’s my turn to feel my innermost self rebel. No, I refuse to accept the injustice of my death, I ask for just a moment more, every moment is so powerful, just savoring the passing of the seconds is enough to put me in a trance.

The twelve men lift their weapons and take aim. Is my life passing before my eyes? The only thing I feel is an extraordinary revolution: I am alive. Every instant is infinitely divisible, death cannot reach me, I plunge into the hard kernel of the present.

The present began twenty-eight years ago. With the babbling of my consciousness, I witnessed my strange joy at being alive.

Strange because disrespectful: all around me was sorrow. I was eight months old when my father died in a de-mining accident. Which just goes to show: dying is a family tradition.

My father was a soldier, twenty-five years old. That day, he was supposed to learn how to de-mine. The lesson didn’t last long: by mistake, a real mine had been laid in the place of a fake one. He died in early 1937.

Two years earlier, he had married my mother, Claude. It was a beautiful love story of the kind often found in the upper class, in that reserved and dignified Belgium so singularly reminiscent of the nineteenth century. Photographs show a young couple riding their horses through the forest. My parents are very elegant, handsome and slender, and they are very much in love. Like characters straight out of a late-romantic novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly.

What astonishes me about these photographs is how happy my mother looks. I never saw her like that. The photo album of their wedding ends with pictures of a funeral. In all likelihood my mother had intended to write captions for the photographs later on, when she had the time. But in the end she no longer felt like it. Her life as a bride whose every wish had been fulfilled had lasted two years.

At the age of twenty-five, her features stiffened into a widow’s mask. She never took it off. Even her smile was rigid. A hardness spread over her face and deprived her of her youth.

People around her said, At least you have a child to console you.

She would turn toward the cradle, where she saw a pretty baby who looked happy. So much joviality disheartened her.

Yet when I was born, she’d loved me. Her first child was a boy: they’d congratulated her. Now she knew that I was not her first but her only child. She was indignant at the notion that she must replace her love for her husband with the love of a child. Of course no one had ever put it to her in those terms. But that was how she took it.

Claude’s father was a general. The death of his son-in-law was perfectly acceptable to him. He did not comment on it. The apolitical silence imposed by the Great Army on its members had made a great silent general of him.

Claude’s mother was a gentle, tenderhearted woman. She was horrified by her daughter’s fate.

Let me share your sorrow, my poor child.

Stop it, Maman. Let me suffer.

Suffer, take a good dose of suffering. It will only last for a while. After that you’ll remarry.

Don’t say that! Never, ever, you hear me, will I remarry. André was and will remain the love of my life.

Of course. Now you have Patrick.

What a strange thing to say!

You love your son.

Yes, I love him. But it’s my husband’s arms that I want, and his gaze. I want his voice, his words.

Would you like to come back home to live?

No. I want to stay in the apartment where I was a married woman.

Would you consider leaving Patrick with me for a while?

Claude shrugged her shoulders, a sign of consent.

My grandmother, delighted, took me home with her. This woman, who had two sons and a daughter, all grown, was very glad of this godsend: a new little doll to pamper.

My little Patrick, you’re such a pretty baby, such a little love!

She let my hair grow long and dressed me in black or blue velvet outfits, with collars of lace from Bruges. I had silk stockings and ankle boots with buttons. She would lift me up and point to my reflection in the mirror.

Have you ever seen a more beautiful child?

She looked at me with such ecstasy that I believed I was beautiful.

Have you seen your long lashes, like an actress’s, your blue eyes, your pale skin, your sweet lips, your black hair? You’re picture-perfect.

This notion stayed with her. She summoned her daughter to have her sit with me for a well-known artist in Brussels. Claude refused. Her mother knew she would eventually wear down her resistance.

My mother began