Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb

that’s all his doing.”
    â€œCome now, Monsieur Tach, calm down. Let’s go on with the interview. How do you explain the extraordinary success—”
    â€œWould you like a Brandy Alexander?”
    â€œNo, thank you. As I was saying, the extraordinary success of—”
    â€œWait, I would like one.”
    Alchemical interlude.
    â€œThis brand-new war has given me a raging thirst for Brandy Alexanders. It is such a solemn beverage.”
    â€œRight. Monsieur Tach, How do you explain the extraordinary success of your novels the world over?”
    â€œI don’t explain it.”
    â€œGo on, you must have thought about it and come up with some answers.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo? You have sold millions of copies, even in China, and this doesn’t make you think?”
    â€œWeapons factories sell thousands of missiles the world over every day, and that doesn’t make them think, either.”
    â€œThere’s no comparison.”
    â€œYou don’t think so? And yet there is a striking parallel. There’s an accumulation, for example: we talk about an arms race, we should also talk about a ‘literature race.’ It’s a cogent argument like any other: every nation brandishes its writer or writers as if they were cannons. Sooner or later I too will be brandished, and they’ll prepare my Nobel Prize for battle.”
    â€œIf that’s the way you look at it, I have to agree with you. But thank God, literature is less harmful.”
    â€œNot mine. My literature is even more harmful than war.”
    â€œDon’t you think you’re flattering yourself there?”
    â€œWell, I’m obliged to, because I am the only reader who is capable of understanding me. Yes, my books are more harmful than war, because they make you want to die, whereas war, in fact, makes you want to live. After reading me, people should feel like committing suicide.”
    â€œAnd how do you explain the fact that they don’t?”
    â€œWell, I can explain it very easily: it is because nobody reads me. Basically, that may also be the reason for my extraordinary success: if I am so famous, my good man, it is because nobody reads me.”
    â€œBut that’s a paradox!”
    â€œOn the contrary: if these poor folk had tried to read me, they would have disliked me from the start and, to avenge themselves for the effort they wasted on me, they would have consigned me to oblivion. But because they do not read me, they find me restful and therefore I am to their liking and deserving of success.”
    â€œThat is an extraordinary argument.”
    â€œBut it is irrefutable. Take Homer, for example: now there is a writer who has never been this famous. Yet do you know many people who have truly read the real Iliad, or the real Odyssey? A handful of bald philologists, that’s all—because you can’t really qualify as readers a few dozy high school students mumbling their way through Homer in the classroom when all they’re thinking about is Depeche Mode or AIDS. And it is precisely for that excellent reason that Homer is
the
authority.”
    â€œBut assuming this is true, do you really think it’s an excellent argument? Is it not regrettable, rather?”
    â€œI insist that it is excellent. Is it not comforting for a true, pure, great genius of a writer like myself to know that no one reads me? That no trivial gaze has sullied the beauty to which I have given birth in the secrecy of my inner self and of my solitude?”
    â€œTo avoid that trivial gaze, would it not have been simpler not to get published at all?”
    â€œThat would be too easy. No, you see, the
nec plus ultra
of refinement is to sell millions of copies and never be read.”
    â€œNot to mention the fact that you have earned a great deal of money.”
    â€œCertainly. I do like money.”
    â€œYou like money, do you?”
    â€œYes. It’s