We know that winter is ending because Anagrama publishes, with an impeccable translation by Sergi Pàmies, the latest novel by Amélie Nothomb. The legend is that the Belgian writer finishes several a year. And in the end, she chooses one. Thus, prudent in the format – for almost two decades it has barely needed more than a hundred pages – his novels are as ambitious in the mental journey as in the enjoyment of life – no matter how dramatic the events they contain may sometimes be, there is no novel his without celebration of being alive. That being the case, on Sant Jordi’s day, let me celebrate books and architecture with her. It’s not just that Nothomb is one of my favorite writers. The important thing is that she always makes you think. And she always makes you smile. There is never a time when she doesn’t teach you something, and she usually celebrates fantasy and intelligence in a big way. She is so smart that she makes her readers partake in her audacity and feel smarter than stupid. Nothomb celebrates the best in life, but never herself. She never uses an extra word. And she always frees you from any prejudice.
So things, with The aerostats Nothomb travels to his city: Brussels. There he secludes himself in two houses. The first is occupied by a protagonist, a university student. The second, a high school student. They both live in certain fear. Or annoyance. The university student lives with a girl her age. She is the owner of the apartment or acts as such: the one who rents out rooms. As a responsible person, she is scrupulous, orderly, Cartesian and… unbearable. It is clear that she is in charge of order and has no reason to impose herself. But her idea of her order suffocates. It is the order that sustains the organization of gridded people. This foreign organization works by contrast. It allows the protagonist to see her own defects – carelessness – and those of others – obsessive control. Nothomb tells all this with descriptions. No judgments. Narrating domestic details: how you leave the towel in the bathroom. Whether or not you close the gel bottles…
The other Belgian house is that of a millionaire who lives with his son and his wife. Although the presence of the woman is imperceptible. That’s great information. In this house, the disorderly student – turned private tutor – achieves another vision that is more astonished than fearful. The walls spy. Wealth overwhelms. And freedom finds space beyond the house, outside, escaping the comfort that is control. Of course, studying and reading can only be done at home: without emergencies, without problems, with books, with light, with a certain comfort. With money. With the money of whoever controls.
Nothomb’s Brussels is a beautiful city. “Interestingly, it has to be very good weather for it to be noticed,” notes the writer. “Almost all the houses face both sides. “When it is sunny, the light passes through the rooms and then Brussels appears built with rays.” Aerostats, those devices that seek lightness, emerge in the pages of this dense and architectural novel, metaphorically. They contrast with the bullying and envy; with paternity exercised as responsibility and control. Aerostats belong to the past and at the same time speak of future, imminent needs: lightness, sleep, the escape that reading also offers. “My father says that he doesn’t have time to read, but he does have time to accumulate books and have them chosen by experts. When they are not hosts, my parents eat anything and spend their days and nights in nothingness. The house is sumptuous because they like to organize parties, but my father and mother do not give a damn about what they pompously call their art of living: the furniture is beautiful, the books, the pretty dishes, the refined scenes are not for they. They are for the guests. “My father despises my mother and she doesn’t even realize it.”
This psychological-architectural portrait is put into the mouth of a 16-year-old dyslexic student who has never finished a book in his life and who, by talking to the right person, begins to devour them. Lack is an indicator of its limits. He explains that his parents have a showcase house to hide in themselves. “They withdraw into themselves, which is the definition of idiocy.” And at the same time… he lives locked up. It is true: literature is not an art to bring people to agreement.
When we are alone we are as we are. Nothomb describes that her protagonist’s way of being alone consists of closing herself in her world: she is not part of the herd, she does not seek to be like the others or swear loyalty to the ringleaders or oppose them. She doesn’t need anyone to save her from her. “It is you who have the power to save,” she writes. “You and I are delicate beings born in a town of brutes.” And she concludes: “I like solitude, the only valid reason to abandon it is love.”
Nothomb writes that “youth is a talent, it takes time to acquire it. Many years later I finally became a young person.” He notes that we have life when we feel desire. And she concludes with an anecdote that portrays her as a writer. It’s about Cézanne.
The painter had a friend whom everyone considered stupid, uninteresting. One day when that friend was not present, those around him asked Cézanne how he could feel friendship for a guy like that. Put between a rock and a hard place, he ended up responding: “choose the olives well. I don’t know anything about olives. He is far from stupid and uninteresting. When he arrives here it is as if life disembarked.”
Until we know how to choose the olives well. We are left with the houses, and our way of living in them, to make us think.
