Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb Page B

agree?”
    â€œIf that is the case, is it not tragic to be a writer?”
    â€œIf there is something tragic about the situation, that is certainly not the reason. It is beneficial not to be read. You can write whatever you like.”
    â€œBut in the beginning, someone must have read you, otherwise you would not have become famous.”
    â€œIn the beginning, perhaps, a little bit.”
    â€œWhich brings me back to my initial question: how do you explain your extraordinary success? Why did your early novels touch a nerve with readers?”
    â€œI don’t know. That was back in the 1930s. There was no television, people had to find something to keep busy.”
    â€œYes, but why you, rather than another writer?”
    â€œThe truth is, it was after the war that I began to be so successful. Which is amusing when you think about it, because I was in no way involved with that huge farce: I was already virtually a total invalid, and ten years earlier, I had been declared unfit for service because of my obesity. In 1945 the great expiation began: whether they were confused or not, people felt they had reasons to be ashamed. So when they happened upon my novels, which seemed to be screaming with imprecations and were overflowing with filth, they decided they had found a punishment commensurate with their own baseness.”
    â€œAnd was it?”
    â€œIt might have been. But it might have been something else, too. But there you are,
vox populi, vox dei
. And then very quickly they stopped reading me. As with Céline, moreover: Céline is probably one of the least read of all writers. The difference is that I wasn’t being read for the right reasons, whereas he wasn’t being read for the wrong reasons.”
    â€œYou often refer to Céline.”
    â€œI love literature, sir. Are you surprised?”
    â€œYou do not expurgate him, I gather?”
    â€œNo. He’s the one who is constantly expurgating me.”
    â€œHave you met him?”
    â€œNo, I’ve done better than that: I’ve read him.”
    â€œAnd has he read you?”
    â€œCertainly. I could often sense as much when I was reading him.”
    â€œYou think you have influenced Céline?”
    â€œLess than he influenced me, but still.”
    â€œAnd who else might you have influenced?”
    â€œNo one, obviously, because no one else has read me. Although, thanks to Céline, I have been read—truly read—at least once.”
    â€œSo you see that you do want to be read.”
    â€œBy him, only by him. I don’t give a damn about other people.”
    â€œHave you met other writers?”
    â€œNo, I have met no one and no one has come to meet me. I know very few people: Gravelin, of course, and apart from him, the butcher, the milkman, the grocer, and the tobacconist. That’s all, I think. Oh yes, there’s also that bitch of a nurse, and the journalists. I don’t like to see people. If I live alone, it’s not so much because I love solitude but that I hate humankind. You can write in your rag that I’m a filthy misanthropist.”
    â€œWhy are you a misanthropist?”
    â€œYou haven’t read
Filthy People
, I suppose?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNaturally. If you had read it, you would know why. There are a thousand reasons to despise people. The most important one, for me, is their bad faith, which is incorrigible. What’s more, nowadays, this bad faith is more widespread than ever. You can well imagine that I have lived through a number of eras: nevertheless, I can assure you that never have I so despised an era the way I do this one. An era of full-blown bad faith. Bad faith is worse than disloyalty, duplicity, perfidy. If you are in bad faith, first of all you are lying to yourself, not because you are struggling with your conscience, but for your own syrupy self-satisfaction, using pretty names like ‘modesty’ or