Thursday, March 28

Amélie Nothomb’s metamorphosis into Jesus Christ infuriates secularists and religious


In Introduction to Teresa of Jesus, Cristina Morales mutated into the holy nun who dared to write at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The advantage that the author had was that lay readers might not be familiar with the texts of her protagonist or even with her figure. A double opportunity to discover the great writer that Teresa de Jesús was and update some thoughts that she possibly had and she did not express for fear of ending up burned on a pyre. What Amélie Nothomb does in Thirst (Anagram) comes to be the same, but with uneven results.

Cristina Morales, writer: “Confinement has been romanticized”

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The Belgian writer returns, like every year for 30 years, with a reinterpretation of the Gospel. But she is not just any narrator: she is Jesus Christ. From Pilate’s trial to the crucifixion, Nothomb speaks through the mouth of a humanized Jesus, upset and even angry with the project of his god. “Father, why do you act with this short-sightedness? Am I blaspheming? It’s true, punish me then. Can you punish me even more?”, she proclaims in one of the pages that recount the hours before his torture.

Thirst reviews the wedding at Cana –where he says that the Virgin Mary got drunk with the water that she turned into wine–, the relationship with Magdalena –with whom he describes that he had sexual relations–, the preference towards his apostles and the fear of physical pain of the death penalty. A series of known episodes but passed by the author’s own patina of irony and irreverence. Although the literary symbiosis that Morales achieved with Teresa de Jesús, emulating her Renaissance style and endowing it with punk, here it remains cold.

It might seem that Amélie Nothomb chose this theme and the first person to provoke, but nothing further according to the author. At the press conference of Thirst, Nothomb recalls his family’s ultra-Catholic tradition and his own beliefs to disprove his intention to stir up the Church: “I was three years old when my father told me about Jesus Christ and I immediately realized that he would be a superhero for me and that he would accompany me in one way or another all my life”, he says from the CCCB in Barcelona. But none of these things managed to calm the spirits of some readers.

It can be said that the young Church is favorable to the book and the old Church is quite lukewarm, if not insulting

“There has been an incredible misunderstanding in France and Belgium, where believers and non-believers have complained,” acknowledges the 55-year-old writer. “Some say it is blasphemy and others that it is a religious book. But it is neither one thing nor the other. It is a novel about a person who accepts suffering infamous pain and my challenge was to explain the reason for that mystery,” he clarifies. .

Following the publication, Nothomb has received his “first letters from priests full of insults”. “It can be said that the young part of the Church is favorable to the book and the old part is quite lukewarm, if not insulting”, summarizes the author. “How do people who claim to profess a religion that promotes love manage to say such hateful things?” she wonders. “It’s quite a different idea from what I have of this religion.”

Also in his close circle there were divisions: “My father and my mother liked the book a lot, which was what mattered to me, but I will say that the rest of my family has found it more difficult to accept it,” he acknowledges.

The Crucifixion of Amelie

Amélie Nothomb (born Fabienne Claire) belongs to the Belgian upper bourgeoisie and a family whose past is linked to the extreme right and Catholicism. Thanks to her father’s profession as a diplomat, she Amélie was able to settle down and live with different cultures, from Japan to Burma, and open her mind. There is nothing from her biography that she has censored in her books, which religiously go to print every year since 1992. In that debut of hers, killer hygieneopened up about his brother’s death at the hands of a drunk in a street fight.

“This is the oldest and most important project of my life. I have been planning for 50 years, something that of course will not happen again,” he explains about Thirst. Nothomb assures that he wanted to make a novel about Jesus Christ since he felt the first impulse of literature. “But it couldn’t be from one day to the next. I needed to gain muscle, write a lot and that’s why I practiced for years with so many novels,” he says, referring to the thirty that he already accumulates. In 2018, however, he knew that he had to start when he first felt the fear of getting old and losing all his strength.

I have read all the gospels and they seem admirable, nutritious texts, but they have gaps from my humble point of view

“I have read all the Gospels and they seem to me admirable, nutritious texts, but they have gaps from my humble point of view. I think the Gospels lack the body”, reasons the author. That is why she wanted to treat the way to the crucifixion, “the gospel of the body”, and title it Thirst as “the union between the body and the spirit”. “If you don’t know why, I suggest you go a whole day without drinking and then you’ll understand,” she says, self-proclaimed a “thirst champion.”

And why in the first person singular? “It seemed obvious to me and not because I consider myself Jesus, but because to accept the crucifixion I had to be inside. And the truth is that I lived it in a first degree during all the writing, which was very hard, perhaps the worst of all my novels. Every morning, when I got up, I thought I had to go back up to the cross. And of course I didn’t feel like it. But this allowed me to live something comparable for four months to what Jesus lived that night”, he declares.

christ in art

From Jesus Christ Superstar until Passion of Christ, art has reinterpreted biblical texts with different licences. The Jesus of Nothomb has more in common with the Mel Gibson film than with the well-known musical. “The only thing we know is that Jesus existed, what we don’t know is if he was the son of God. It seems more interesting to me to think that he wasn’t, that Jesus was just any person who, without knowing why one fine day he decided to be Jesus, exist and be available to others,” Nothomb said.

Hence his humanized and suffering vision: “I underline the paradoxes of the canonical version of the Gospels, which say that we have to love one another and love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and at the same time they show Jesus accepting to be crucified. That is, accepting to suffer the greatest suffering that a person can endure. A person who accepts that does not love himself. What they preach no longer makes sense. It is a totally monstrous thing”.

Jesus offers himself to suffering and the Church glorifies him. It’s a totally monstrous thing

Amélie Nothomb wonders in Thirst why “Jesus offers himself to suffering and the Church glorifies him”. “That part made me sick, and as I wrote I began to find an answer beginning,” she says. He does not intend to declare himself in possession of the absolute truth on this subject, but rather to propose a version and invite “everyone to explain his own vision of Christ.” In fact, he assures that other countries are more prepared than France or Belgium to listen to these heterodox interpretations of the Bible: “In Spain you enjoy better health and I am not talking about the economic one, but about the psychological one. In France we are mired in a great depression “.

“Literature has been interested in this topic very recently. But the other arts have always been addressing this topic,” he says, referring to heavy metal or Catholic rock. “When there is suffering, in one way or another, whether we are believers or not, we refer to Jesus. And authentic suffering is what leads to authentic questions,” he justifies.

Two years into the pandemic, that need to address and resolve pain became pressing for Nothomb. “The last word of my novel is loneliness. It is very important, because for me it is like a disease. I don’t know how you experienced it in Spain, but I was in Paris, in my apartment, and the loneliness became very long. It is what happens in a prison without walls, where there is only the impossibility of leaving, “he confesses. That is why, for her Thirst it goes far beyond religion and gospels. “It was a foreboding book.”



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