Sulphuric Acid [Paperback]

Amelie Nothomb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2008

"Sulphuric Acid" tells the story of a reality TV death camp, which has become the nation's obsession - an amoral spectacle played out through the media. It is a blackly funny and shocking satire on the modern predilection for reality television and celebrity, in which the audience at home develops a taste for blood.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"'It's always fun to take a journey inside her extraordinary Belgian brain.' Dan Rhodes"

About the Author

Belgian by nationality, Amelie Nothomb was born in Japan, and now lives in Paris. Described in the New York Times as 'slyly outrageous', she is the bestselling author of fifteen novels, translated into thirty languages. Her highly acclaimed UK debut, The Book of Proper Names, was published in 2004.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (April 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571234933
• ISBN-13: 978-0571234936
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,184,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars WHAT IS THIS??!, December 15, 2011

By 

Ha Pham - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sulphuric Acid (Paperback)

This is probably the only book that I literally did not put down at all while reading. The reason: This book was so BAD, I spent my whole day flipping through pages, searching in vain for something of substance to at least make it a one-star. But no, this book totally disappointed me. The writing and the protagonist's thinking process were simply unbearable, pushing the book from being almost intriguing to downright ridiculous. I felt like I was reading a project of a ten-year-old, so bad that I was almost offended when a book of this quality was ever publised.
REALLY, until today, I still don't know if this book was meant to be a joke in the first place or some publishers slept through quality-checking for it.

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, horrific, August 10, 2011

By 

Colin McLarty (Chardon, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sulphuric Acid (Paperback)

Nothomb's first novel, the coruscatingly intelligent, hilarious and appalling Hygiene and Assassin remains her single best, and she has written some wonderful novels since. Some lighter and funnier. Some more lyrical. All have richer fuller characters than this one for a reason: they are not set in such an impoverished hell as this. This is the first to rival Hygiene for penetrating intelligence.

Where Hygiene is mordantly funny this book is, like the acid of the title, simply mordant. Do not think of that eye on the cover as "watching." Think of the acid hitting that eye. If you do not like that image then do not read this book. The things the eye is eager to see *are* the acid.

To call this book a "shocking satire on reality television" is true but inadequate. Nothomb is simply too strong a writer to write anything so easy as that. It is not about television. It is also not a realistic account of concentration camp life -- far from it. After half a year of beatings, starvation, and sleep deprivation the heroine remains "beautiful." The prisoners and the guards hold desperate but reasoned conversations of a kind you will not find in Primo Levi, let alone in transcribed interviews with concentration camp survivors. The violence is unremitting but not graphic or lurid.

Quite the opposite. Nothomb does all she can to keep *no* distance between you and the horror. It is not like reading accounts of others. It is not like watching a documentary or a gory movie. It is about horrors not of cuelty iteslf but of taking pleasure from cruelty. In terms of the novel the pleasure goes to producers, and guards, and viewers, and prisoners who engineer harm to others, and not least to those who condemn the 'program' in self-satisfying ways that really only promote it. But here I am getting preachy. This book is *not* preachy. It is horrific.

Honestly, not everyone wants to experience previously unimaginable horrors. That's okay. Do not read this book if you do not want horror. But it is her strongest writing since Hygiene.

If you can, though, read it in French (Acide Sulphurique). Her French is clear and accessible if you are not fluent. In this book, even more than most of hers, every word is extremely well chosen. The vocabulary is not arcane or somehow untranslatable. It is just so precise. Another language obviously will not present exactly the same choices of words and meanings, no matter how skilled and committed the translator.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biting Satire of Voyeuristic Television, February 3, 2009

By 

J. L. Barbret (Détroit, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sulphuric Acid (Paperback)

I found this to be an engaging commentary of the recent TV phenomenon of "reality programming". She confronts the subject in a similar way to her analysis of food in "Biographie de la faim" (aka The Life of Hunger). I have read nearly all of Ms. Nothomb's works in French, so cannot speak to the English translation, but I must say that this was one of my favorite works by one of my favorite authors.