Review of Amélie Nothomb's "Fear and Trembling"

When an author is capable of describing a culture with such precision, humor, language and empathy... all the reader is left to do is admire and enjoy the read.
This is one of those cases, I finished the book in mere hours, not wanting to put it down.

What struck me as odd was how much the rules and etiquette of the Japanese world are similar to the old-fashioned Armenian rules and etiquette (Now that I think of it, it is probably true for many older cultures).  All the twisted ways of looking at life, the priority of others' opinions over one's happiness and contentment, the need to be a 'good' person (which always requires you to be miserable), the self-deprecation, self-judgment, self-loathing for the sake of distorted understanding of honor... Nothomb goes on a rant about the "place" of a woman in Japanese society and she nails it: the passage is like a humorous and clever formula. She couldn't have said it better. It is a distant cousin of Zamyatin's "We" and Orwell's "1984": the pristine, perfect society where everything and everyone has a place, duty and responsibilities, without a hint at such 'shameful' things as displays of love and compassion. And as the author so aptly put it "The core of the system's sadism lay contained in this contradiction: obeying the rules eventually meant disobeying the rules".

This book also reminded me a lot of Kafka's "The Castle" and Kobo Abe's "The Woman in Dunes", but this was brought on by the conversations of Amelie and Fubuki, where Amelie could not, try as she might, find her way out of the labyrinth of the conversations. Whatever she said, however she tried to explain herself - she was perceived as perverted, antagonistic, hostile and pusillanimous. I always wondered why certain cultures that force you to obey and honor their 'rules', so often do not reciprocate in the same way.

There were two ways the writer could have taken: one was to blow up, the other to grow as a human. Author chose the latter.

Five stars.