Primera sangre

We are in the Congo, in 1964, and a man stands before a firing squad. That man, kidnapped by rebels along with fifteen hundred other Westerners, is the young Belgian consul in Stanleyville. His name is Patrick Nothomb, and he is the future father of the writer. Starting from this extreme situation, Amélie Nothomb reconstructs her father's life before that moment. And she does so by giving him a voice. It is Patrick himself who narrates his experiences in the first person. And so we learn of his military father, killed in maneuvers by a landmine explosion when he was very young; of his distant mother, who sent him to live with his grandparents; of his poet and tyrannical grandfather, who lived detached from the world; of the decadent and ruined aristocratic family that owned a castle; of the hunger and hardships during the Second World War.