Human Rites Book

This fucking sucked. I think I've never read a play that was more useless and pretentious, and I've read La Sainte Courtisane by Oscar Wilde, so that's saying something. Amélie Nothomb really irritates me but kind of in a good way. She seems quite fucked up and I respect that. I highly enjoyed Robert des noms propres and I am very interested in reading more from her, since she always comes up with the weirdest and bizarre ideas for her novels... play writing, however, doesn't seem to be her thing though, even in her novels I don't think that dialogues are her strong points, it's usually the idea behind the story that's most brilliant.

The same kind of applies to Les Combustibles (eng.: Human Rites) as it's about good ole book burning. We are in a war setting where fuels are getting scarce, that's why a professor, his assistant and the assistant's girlfriend decide to burn some books to relish in the heat. The question arises which books should be burned first and what the consequences of these actions are. Un livre n'est pas un bibelot que l'on contemple pour se consoler du monde. Un livre, c'est un détonateur qui sert à faire réagir les gens. I was kind of keen on this idea since I am a bibliophile myself and reading about books always makes me happy, I wasn't necessarily expecting another Fahrenheit 451 but I was hoping for a broader message. Amélie left me thoroughly disappointed on that front.

The play is complete horse shit, if you ask me. The writing is messy, the dialogues are weird and not authentic (even though she tries to create a realistic vibe). The setting is beyond unbelievable (especially the background info of having a war going on in that country). The characters were annoying as hell and whilst I started out liking the professor and his sassy ways, I just wanted to punch his ass toward the end. The way he sexually harassed Marina was so fucking creepy (her reaction towards the abuse was even weirder) and just made me mad. Overall, I literally got nothing out of reading this play. It was beyond boring.

I felt like Nothomb was trying to showcase the decline of humanity: by burning the books the characters became more and more unethical and nearly "animalistic" (all of this rolling around on the floor fighting, I would cackle if it hadn't been so damn annoying). However, Nothomb's execution is too messy, the point she makes too obvious. An old professor who turns out to be shallow and impudent. A young woman whose obsession gets the best of her. A young man becoming disillusioned with love and his mentor. What's new? I can't help but compare her to Yasmina Reza who's an excellent playwright and who excels at showing the fucked up human condition.

I'm still veeeery interested in reading more of her novels because many of their synopsis just sound too good to be true but I'm staying away of her plays from now on. Oh, and to answer the central question of the play, if I could just keep one book of my entire collection and had to burn the rest, I would keep The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, without a doubt. What about you?