One of the things I love most about France is the seriousness with which the publication of up-to-the minute novels is treated. The most significant time for new works to appear is known as the “rentrée littéraire,” when all the latest offerings by both young and established writers appear in bookstores in late August/early September.
A favorite author of mine whose books have unfailingly appeared every year since 1992 is the Belgian-born but Paris-based Amélie Nothomb. As my reviews of her books on these pages over the years have indicated, I am a great fan of both her often wildly implausible but riveting fictional tales and her autobiography-inspired pieces. Unfortunately, her new book, L’Impossible Retour (The Impossible Return), which belongs to the latter category, proves to be a major disappointment.
Nothomb was brought up in the Far East, and Japan looms large in her works, perhaps most famously in Stupeur et Tremblements from 1999 (turned into a film, starring Sylvie Testud, in 2003), which evokes her experience as a young woman trying to fit into the very hierarchical Japanese work culture. L’Impossible Retour follows a recent return trip made to Japan in May 2023 in the company of the photographer Pep Beni (presumably given a fictional name by Nothomb).
Although the book starts promisingly with an elegant reflection on travel – “Tout départ est une aberration” (“Every departure is an aberration”) – it quickly becomes a kind of travelogue of what, it must be admitted, sounds like a very dull visit made even more irksome by the narrator’s insufferable traveling companion. If this had been transformed into an account of the trip from hell, it might have maintained a modicum of interest, but the narrator shows herself to be strangely accepting of her friend’s regular tantrums (Pep insists twice that they move hotels, once because she heard people talking and again because she claimed there were dust mites in the room) and infuriating refusal to be respectful of Japanese customs.
We are frequently told that Pep suffers from asthma, but one’s sympathy for her affliction is somewhat undermined by her demand to cuddle foul-smelling rabbits in a Tokyo rabbit café. For her part, the narrator seems to spend much of the time weeping or dewy-eyed about her memories of Japan, without fully allowing the reader to grasp what exactly is touching about these evocations.
Throw into the mix a dreary Tokyo-based French family that takes the pair on uninteresting excursions to uninteresting places, and you get the gist. I only hope that some readers who know and love Japan will gain pleasure from some of the descriptions of spots that they themselves might have visited.
An attempt to give a veneer of literary respectability to the book is made when the narrator writes about rereading French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans’ classic 1884 novel À Rebours (Against Nature) over the course of the trip, which made me wonder about the significance of an entirely France-based text to the Japanese setting. The narrator hardly helps matters toward the end of the book when she writes that “my pilgrimage also passes through that [her reading of the novel], even though I cannot really explain why.”
I hate to say it, being such an admirer of Nothomb’s fiction, but the tedium of L’Impossible Retour will make it impossible for me to return to this particular text. For a much more evocative and memorable piece of autofiction, and to remind you of what a truly great writer Nothomb can be, I recommend her 2021 book, Premier Sang (First Blood).
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