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Frappe-toi le cœur

Frappe-toi le cœur

Contemporary LiteratureLiterary Fiction
Pages
128
Published
2019
Language
English

Synopsis

From the moment Diane is born, her mother Marie feels not love but jealousy — a raw, instinctive hostility toward her own child's beauty and brightness. Marie delegates Diane's care entirely to her father and his family and proceeds to live as if the child does not exist. Diane grows up brilliant and generous despite her mother's coldness, determined to become a cardiologist. At university, she meets the assistant professor Olivia: cold, calculating, and hungry to feel superior. Olivia becomes the second predator in Diane's life — a recurrence that forces Diane to ask whether something in her nature attracts this response from women in positions of authority. A novel about how cruelty from mothers is replicated by women who occupy the mother role, and about whether the capacity for love survives repeated betrayal. Published in 2017 by Albin Michel. The title comes from Alfred de Musset's poem 'La nuit de décembre': 'Frappe-toi le cœur, c'est là qu'est le génie.'

Prose complexity
3/10

Vibe

DarkEmotionalTenseThought-Provoking
Coming of AgeBetrayalRivalsMorally Grey

Genres

Contemporary Literature Literary Fiction

About the author

A
Amélie Nothomb

Born in Etterbeek, Brussels, in 1966, Amélie Nothomb spent her childhood moving across continents — Japan, China, the United States, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos — as the daughter of a Belgian diplomat. Japan was the country that marked her most deeply: she has called it the paradise she was expelled from when her family left. She began writing at age twelve, producing manuscripts she has described as unspeakably bad, and completed seventeen novels before publishing a single one. Her debut, Hygiène...

Characters

DianeProtagonist

A gifted young woman who grows up without her mother's love and whose gifts provoke the same predatory response from the women who follow.

MarieAntagonist

Diane's mother, whose jealousy of her own child from birth is the novel's originary wound.

OliviaSupporting

A university assistant professor who mirrors Marie's dynamic — cold, competitive, and unable to tolerate being outshone.

All characters in Frappe-toi le cœur

Frequently asked questions

  • What is the source of the title?

    The title comes from Alfred de Musset's 1835 poem 'La nuit de décembre': 'Frappe-toi le cœur, c'est là qu'est le génie' — 'Strike your heart, that is where genius lives.' Nothomb uses the line to frame Diane's gifts as inseparable from the wounds she carries.

  • When was Frappe-toi le cœur published?

    Published in 2017 by Albin Michel. The 2019 date sometimes listed reflects the English translation or a paperback edition.

  • Why does Marie feel jealous of her own daughter?

    The novel frames it as instinctive rather than calculated — Marie reacts to Diane's beauty and brilliance with a hostility she cannot explain or master. Nothomb treats it as a form of pathological narcissism in which the mother cannot tolerate the child being more than herself.

  • Is maternal jealousy a theme Nothomb has explored elsewhere?

    Yes — the absent or harmful mother recurs across Nothomb's work, in Le Livre des sœurs, in Les Prénoms épicènes, and in Tant mieux. But Frappe-toi le cœur is the most direct treatment of maternal jealousy specifically, rather than indifference or cruelty more generally.

  • Does Diane confront her mother?

    The novel builds toward a confrontation that the plot handles with deliberate restraint — Diane's response to what has been done to her is the ethical center of the book.

  • Is Olivia more dangerous than Marie?

    The novel suggests they occupy the same function — predatory authority directed at someone with more gift than the authority figure can tolerate — but that Olivia arrives after the damage is already done, making her in some ways the more calculated of the two.

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