• Rijeka City Library / Gradska Knjiznica Rijeka, Croatia
  
  

Publisher of Nominated Edition
St. Martins Press ISBN 0312320558

To have an extraordinary life, Lucette believes, one must have an extraordinary name. Horrified by the pedestrian names her husband chooses for their unborn child (Tanguy if it's a boy, Joelle if it's a girl), Lucette does the only honourable thing to save her baby from such an unexceptional destiny - she kills her spouse. While in prison, Lucette fives birth to a daughter to whom she bequeaths the portentous name of an obscure saint, Plectrude, before hanging herself.

The novel therefore begins on the borderline between tragedy and absurdity, but as Plectrude grows - raised by a loving, indulgent, and eccentric aunt - it becomes a deeply moving and simultaneously chilling portrait of girlhood. Plectrude's great gift turns out to be for ballet, and she throws herself into dance as if her life depended upon it. Few novels have shown us the implacable and unforgiving world of ballet with more intuitive sympathy, yet also with a keen-eyed assessment of the true price of artistic perfection. Inevitably, the doom hovering over Plectrude's life from birth returns to haunt her, and in the end she learns to survive in the only way she knows how - by committing an act of deadly self-preservation her mother would have perhaps understood best.

The Book of Proper Names is vintage Amélie Nothomb - alternatively mordant and poignant, a portrait of adolescence that is fierce and funny at the same time. There is nothing mediocre either about Nothomb, nor her creations.

Belgian by nationality, Amélie Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan, and currently lives in Paris. She is the author of eight novels, translated into fourteen languages, including The Character of Rain and Fear and Trembling, which won the Grand Prix of the Academie Française and the Prix Internet du Livre.