Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb Page A

ravishing. I’ve never found it useful, but I do enjoy looking at it. A five franc coin is as pretty as a daisy.”
    â€œNow, such a comparison would have never occurred to me.”
    â€œThat’s normal, you are not a Nobel laureate.”
    â€œBasically, doesn’t your Nobel Prize go against your theory? Doesn’t it oblige us to assume that at least the Nobel committee has read your work?”
    â€œI wouldn’t bank on it. But in the event that the committee members did read me, you can be sure that it wouldn’t change anything about my theory. There are a great many people who push sophistication to the point of reading without reading. They’re like frogmen, they go through books without absorbing a single drop of water.”
    â€œYes, you mentioned them in a previous interview.”
    â€œThose are the frog-readers. They make up the vast majority of human readers, and yet I only discovered their existence quite late in life. I am so terribly naïve. I thought that everyone read the way I do. For I read the way I eat: that means not only do I need to read, but also, and above all, that reading becomes one of my components and modifies them all. You are not the same person depending on whether you have eaten blood pudding or caviar; nor are you the same person depending on whether you have just read Kant (God help us) or Queneau. Well, when I say ‘you,’ I should say ‘I myself and a few others,’ because the majority of people emerge from reading Proust or Simenon in an identical state: they have neither lost a fraction of what they were nor gained a single additional fraction. They have read, that’s all: in the best-case scenario, they know ‘what it’s about.’ And I’m not exaggerating. How often have I asked intelligent people, ‘Did this book change you?’ And they look at me, their eyes wide, as if to say, ‘Why should a book to change me?’”
    â€œAllow me to express my astonishment, Monsieur Tach: you have just spoken as if you were defending books with a message, and that’s not like you.”
    â€œYou’re not very clever, are you? So are you of the opinion that only books ‘with a message’ can change an individual? Those are the books that are the least likely to change them. The books that have an impact, that transform people, are the other ones—books about desire, or pleasure, books filled with genius, and above all books filled with beauty. Let us take, for example, a great book filled with beauty:
Journey to the End of the Night.
How can you not be transformed after you have read it? Well, the majority of readers manage just that tour de force without difficulty. They will come to you and say, ‘Oh yes, Céline is magnificent,’ and then they go back to what they were doing. Obviously, Céline is an extreme example, but I could mention others, too. You are never the same after you have read a book, even as modest a work as one by Léo Malet: one of his books will change you. You will never again look at young women in raincoats in the same way once you’ve read a book by Léo Malet. Really, this is extremely important! Changing the way people see things: that is our magnum opus.”
    â€œDon’t you think that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody changes the way they see things after they have finished a book?”
    â€œOh, no! Only the crème de la crème of readers can do that. The others go on seeing things with their usual flatness. And here we are only talking about readers, who in themselves are a very rare species. Most people do not read. In this regard, there is an excellent quotation by an intellectual whose name I have forgotten: ‘Basically, people do not read; or, if they do read, they don’t understand; or, if they do understand, they forget.’ An admirable summing-up of the situation, don’t you