Winner of the Grand Prix de I'Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre, this taut tour-de-force of a novel created a sensation in France, where it has sold nearly half a million copies. FEAR AND TREMBLING tells the story of Amelie, a young Western woman who spends a year working at a Japanese corporation. She soon learns that at the Yumimoto Corporation hierarchy means everything. Keep to your place and you survive; break ranks and you will be broken. The determined but hapless Amelie makes mistake after mistake, ...
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Winner of the Grand Prix de I'Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre, this taut tour-de-force of a novel created a sensation in France, where it has sold nearly half a million copies. FEAR AND TREMBLING tells the story of Amelie, a young Western woman who spends a year working at a Japanese corporation. She soon learns that at the Yumimoto Corporation hierarchy means everything. Keep to your place and you survive; break ranks and you will be broken. The determined but hapless Amelie makes mistake after mistake, not least of which is deigning to sympathise with her immediate superior, the beautiful, effcient and ice-cold Miss Mori. A perverse process of ritual humiliation follows. But even as Amelie's life at the Yumimoto Corporation spirals inexorably and hilariously downward, what she learns about herself and her colleagues in this brilliant novel will alternately delight and outrage readers. Not since Marguerite Duras has a novelist so indelibly marked the difference between East and West, and with such seductive honesty.
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Add this copy of Fear and Trembling: a Novel to cart. $1.79, good condition, Sold by Once Upon A Time Books rated 1.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Tontitown, AR, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by St. Martin's Press.
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Author seems somewhat less than honest with hersef
I strongly agree with the review by Cheryl
(UK, 10/2009).
As one grinds on through this woeful tale, it becomes increasingly clear that the protagonist is far less a "victim" of cultural misunderstandings than she is of her own personality. It is - very- difficult to believe that she could possibly have been so ignorant of Japanese etiquette, mores and business ethics. (Concerning the latter, one only need consider a moment how her self-serving actions might have been rewarded at a western corporation, and the the Japanese way seems infinitely more civilized!)
Summation: the story of an ambitious, snobby little egotist with a huge sense of entitlement (not very different from the author of The Devil Wears Prada). The comedy (I would rather call it irony) is that she actually does seem to believe she is destined to reap the best of both worlds, by displaying her unabashed western ambition in a culture known for nothing if not its centuries-old traditions of teamwork and self-effacement. Finding, to her shock, that she is not exempt from the rules, she rapidly degenerates into masochism and pathological attention seeking (a further clue that she probably knew what she was getting into- in for a penny, in for a pound). This does not prevent it from being an interesting situation, but Nothomb's persistent if muted insistence in her own victimhood is annoying.
My reading was of an English translation, so I will not comment on style.
