One is tempted, influenced the title of this booklet, to call him a psychological novel. Without diminishing in any way the sharp psychological sense of the author, the more I understand as a moral fable coupled with a treatise on aesthetics :-) In fact, what it really is, to my mind, is not the initiation of a young magician, but the dialectic of the sublime and the foul, purity and perversity, sincerity and manipulation, the wonderful magician and deceit of cheating, the admirable and despicable - all on the same substrate, with respect to the same reality: magic trick, use of drugs, welcome in a home, love scene. Each of these events can be perceived and experienced in two ways that seem diametrically opposed. The theme is not new and is reflected in other novels by Amélie Nothomb in which we hesitate to call, to judge, to take sides. Itself also seem to want to settle, do not want to choose, but rather want to marry contrary, the angel and the monster, or rather establish a bond of filiation between the two without that we know which one is the which is the father and son. The monster eventually contaminate the angel of his madness, while being himself, somehow, subdued or conquered over time - whereby it is ultimately the aesthetic of the grotesque and beautiful intermingling that the wins.
PS is found constants. The author takes the stage onto an assumed coverage in navel gazing. His sentences are short, even clearer than usual, clean up, with only a few obsessions (like borgorygmes and others antics). There are some sayings that will delight graduates as "the wise say that nothing makes sense. Lovers have a deeper wisdom than the wise. He who loves does not doubt the sense of things." Not bad, right? Good. Amélie Nothomb always written in one piece. The narration is written exactly as its dialogues and all actors speak the same way. It is obvious that in "real life" people do not speak well, and I dream that one day, Amélie Nothomb writes the dialogues more vividly by varying the style after the character. She may hate this answer it and it appears to all its delicious sculpt figures in the same way and in the same mold, or that she writes as she speaks and how she thinks, without seeing any reason valid to depart from this model. Too bad!
I still enjoyed this hour of reading this novel that helped me and I see no reason to give it 3 stars mediocre.
