Not quite as good as the other Amélie Nothomb books I have read, but The Character of Rain is still excellent. It is a memoir of Nothomb's first three years of life, in Kobe Japan, with the conceit that she is a "god" which is what she says the Japanese treat all children as through the age of three. It begins with her as an essentially inanimate tube but then at two she becomes animate and quickly teaches herself to speak both French and Japanese fluently and to read, all by around two and a half. The novel is narrated through her young eyes and is a combination of sophistication (e.g., her thoughts about suicide at age three) and humorous ignorance (e.g., not understanding what her father's job as Belgian consul was, and mistakenly seeing him fall into a storm drain and confuse that with his actual job). As usual, the short novella has some very humorous riffs, a lot of perceptive observations, and a bunch that you cannot quite figure out whether it is true or imagined or somewhere in between--but depicting a two year old with this sophistication certainly feels like towards the imagined end of the spectrum.