THE STRANGER NEXT DOOR
(a novel by Amélie Nothomb)
To be alone together, that is all Emile and Juliette want. They buy a house in the woods so they can spend the rest of their lives there. But every day around 4 o’clock the old neighbour Palamède Bernadin knocks on their door. Every day Bernadin sits in their house for two hours. He hardly says a word, he just sits there. Emile and Juliette get quite annoyed, but there is nothing they can do to escape this man.
The Stranger Next Door (original title: Les Catilinaires) is another gripping novel by Amélie Nothomb. Like with so many other books of her, you are reading it and you think: this can’t go on, she can’t keep a story like this up for another x pages. But she can. Amélie Nothomb’s books are genuinely weird: these are stories you won’t find anywhere else.
Nothomb’s biggest talent is how she writes her dialogues. They are so powerful that if dialogues were knives, Amélie would make you cut yourself again and again. Sharp, funny and gripping.
Bernadin’s wife (oh yes, he’s married!) is so incredibly hideous that there is only one person who could turn this book into a movie: David Cronenberg. And just as a Cronenberg movie a novel by Nothomb there’s only one way to get through: let it absorb you. In the end you won’t be disappointed.
Still, it would be unfair to compare Nothomb’s books to Cronenberg’s movies. In fact, it’s difficult to find something you can compare her novels with. A recent Internet site gave her an award for being the author with books that will guide us into the 21st century. That probably means that in the future we can understand what we can enjoy now.
The Stranger Next Door was published by Henry Holt and Company.
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