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Amélie Nothomb: Tant mieux [So Much the Better]

Amélie Nothomb has used fairytale tropes before and we have another one here. It is the old story of the evil old woman and the innocent young girl which we see in such stories as Hansel and Gretel andLittle Red Riding Hood, amongst others.

The book opens in in 1942. The heroine is a four-year-old girl, Adrienne, who lives in Brussels with her parents, Donatien and Astrid, and her sister Jacqueline. The parents have decided that because of the bombardment that Brussels is facing the two children should be sent off to their respective grandmothers Jacqueline goes toBruges to stay with her paternal grandmother whileAdrienne is taken to Ghent by her mother to stay with her maternal grandmother.

Inevitably, the maternal grandmother is your standard fairytale crone. On the first day Adrienne is offered for breakfast herrings in vinegar which she really does not like. She reluctantly eats them and then immediately throws up. The grandmother insists that she must now eat what she threw. up.leAdrienne refuses and then thinks of what magical words she can use to counteract grandmother. She thinks of such words as hocus-pocus and abracadabra then comes up with.tant mieux (So much the better). She doesn’t know what it means, but her mother uses it a lot so it must be good. She utters the words and eats up without throwing up food and thanks her grandmother for a lovely meal. The grandmother, who is of course a sadist, cannot understand what is going on with her granddaughter but has to accept it. She will use the magic words at other times when things are difficult.

Adrienne is locked in a room all day with only a wooden spoon to play with which she treats as some sort of doll. She plays with the furniture and a few items in the room but is of course bored. She sees a window, climbs up to it and proceeds to fall out into the arms of a woman passing by. The woman only speaks Flemish which Adrienne does not speak but the local grocer helps out and to avoid a trouble with the grandmother he gets a ladder and she gets back in. However, she learns from the grocer that her grandmother has a cat which she has never seen.

Of course she cannot ask the grandmother outright if she does have a cat but she cleverly extracts information from her and gets to meet the cat, a large, overweight, mollycoddled tom cat. Soon cat and granddaughter become friends andthe grandmother now more or less accepts.Adrienne because of her relationship with the cat.

Adrienne also sees a portrait of a beautiful young woman on the wall a house and asks who it is. Of course it is the grandmother in her younger days. The grandmother had married a rich man but he lost all his money and she was very bitter as she had to sink down to being an ordinary bourgeois.

Because of the cat situation, she is treated somewhat better but is very happy when her mother comes to pick her up. She tells her mother of the situation and her mother is not terribly sympathetic, not least because the mother and her two sister suffered much more from their mother who had a three cats and told both her cats and her daughters that she much preferred the cats to her daughters,. As a result, the mother hates cats. Once they return home and the story is told to her father it is agreed that she will not go there again.

However, things are not all that smooth at home. It turns out that both parents have a friend of the opposite sex. This becomes complicated when it turns out to her father’s friend is also the mother of her best friend at school, Margareth. The father uses the excuse of taking Adrienne to see her friend to visit his friend. The two adult adults speak English English so that the children will not understand what they are saying. Because of what is going on the mother seems distinctly unhappy and Adrienne hs very worried about her.

We follow the story of the family as the war ends and the situation changes. It seems that Astrid’s friend was a collaborator with the Germans and he has to make a hasty disappearance, which upsets Astrid, leaving her without a boyfriend. However, she will later acquire another one. There have been various stories of cats in the neighbourhood disappearing and Adrienne has her suspicions as to who is responsible, not least because her mother said that she hated cats because of her mothers devotion to the cats at the expense of her daughters.Her friend Margareth has a much loved cat, Bishop, and he too disappears. andAdrienne has firm evidence as to who is guilty but she can do nothing about it.

We continue to follow the story of the family with the various rows between the parents. Eventually they seem to make it up and the result is that Astrid becomes pregnant again. It is at this point, when both parents are hoping for a son, that we learn that as regards the two previous births both girls were given names which originally were going to be boys’ names, namely Jacques and Adrien. The parents are now optimisticthat this third birth will be Charles. They are disappointed, particularly Astrid, when Charlotte is born. Because the mother is not interested in having another daughter., Adrienne take charge and looks after her sister at the expense of her schoolwork which she delegates to her friend.

Jacqueline feels that she is the ugly duckling. Her mother openly favours Adrienne and Jacqueline does not have any friends.She is very late in reaching puberty. Because she is often ill, she feels that her parents pity her rather than love her. She will carry this feeling until she is much older.

There is one person that two girls are happy to see and that is their paternal grandmother in Bruges. They spend some time there and are very happy with her.

We follow the continuing story of the family. Jacqueline turns out to be a very attractive teenager and the boys are after her, but she is not interested. One boy in particular seems to be keen and writes, a love letters and she gets her sister to respond to them. This will later cause various complications which end out to be positive for some but not all all concerned.

While reading this, I was wondering how much was autobiographical.Nothomb gives us a fairly detailed postscript in which she praises her parents and their devotion to one another and discusses her relationship and the relationship of her sister with the parents and was clearly on very good terms with her now deceased parents. We do learn that the wicked grandmother may well have been based on her grandparents. In short this is not an autobiographical novel but, as authors often, her own life very much influences the book..

Publishing history

First published in 2025 by Albin Michel
No English translation