Hypnotized in the haunting literature world of Amelie Nothomb's first novel
Hygiene and the Assassin, I felt an urge to illustrate the satanic beauty of a murder that is executed by the protagonist Pretextat Tach. Not completely close to the story script, my illustration portrays the death of a young girl whose soul reaches out as she's swallowed the poisonous water.
This was done in waterclour pencils and acrylic. For the portrayal of a floating woman, I also consulted John Everett Millias's painting of Ophelia, yet distanced myself from his realist depiction.
A quote from Hygiene and the Assassin, a disturbing story about the loss of innocence and a bewildered, crazy mind:
“The hand is for pleasure. This is devastatingly important. If a writer is not having pleasure, then he must stop immediately. To write without pleasure is immoral. Writing already contains all the seeds of immorality. The writer’s only excuse is his pleasure. A writer who does not have pleasure is as disgusting as some bastard raping a little girl without even getting his rocks off, just for the sake of raping, to commit a gratuitously evil act.”
The author of this book, an Belgian writer Amelie Nothomb, also noted that this was written based on her shocking memory from puberty: the day Nothomb got her first menstruation, she was almost killed! - the nightmare that she has been carrying, even in her literature.
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