The daughter of diplomats, Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan, the "universe of perfection" where she spent the first five years of her life. She then moved to China, to New York when she was eight, followed by Bangladesh, Burma, and eventually Belgium to begin university at seventeen. Her childhood globetrotting has proved a rich source of material for her cheeky, surreal and sharply intelligent books, mostly less fiction than straight autobiography — as long as we're willing to accept the author's slightly fanciful investment of her younger self with a preternatural mordant wisdom. "I ask myself just what communism might be," she says in Loving Sabotage (2000), a witty remembrance of life in 1970s Peking, "I am five years old, and it is far beneath my dignity to ask an adult what the word means."

That her fiction is essentially factual is by no means Nothomb's only divergence from the novel as we generally encounter it. Her brief narratives tell rather than show, feature minimal characterization and plotting, and are bereft of detailed physical descriptions. Even more scandalous: she doesn't revise her handwritten manuscripts, at all. Putting the sentence on the page is "an act of faith," she told a journalist last year.

She doesn't do happy endings, either, with the possible exception of The Book of Proper Names, one of her few non-autobiographical stories. In this trippy, allegorical coming-of-age tale, the unfortunately-named Plectrude overcomes disastrous beginnings (her mother murders her father then kills herself), beats severe anorexia and the resulting loss of her ballet career, but finally finds happiness as a wife and mother (which is when she must free herself by killing the capricious architect of her destiny, Nothomb).

While Plectrude is not based upon her creator, Nothomb does have intimate experience with anorexia. In The Life of Hunger (2006), a meditation on her lifelong love affair with "superhunger" (as she puts it: La faim, c'est moi), she depicts the genesis of her eating disorder, at age 13, as a determination to repudiate adulthood, to quell her blossoming body and its desires (eventually, and happily, starving was replaced by writing). The Life of Hunger also recalls Nothomb's introduction to alcoholism at age four: she would drain half-empty champagne glasses at her parents' parties, and by the time she was ten and living in New York, whiskey was her tipple of choice. "Without wishing to glorify childhood alcoholism," she reports, "I must point out that it never caused me any problems. My childhood adapted very well to my passions."

Alcoholism was just one of the pleasures of New York, where she and her family lived in an apartment overlooking the Guggenheim and went out every night. For Nothomb it was a city — especially as experienced after Maoist China — of "scandalous joy ... boundlessly thrilling."

But not even the excitement of New York could quite eclipse her reverence and nostalgia for Japan, a country as close to the idea of home as the nomadic Nothomb ever knew. After graduating from the Université de Libre du Bruxeles with (like her hero, Nietzsche) a degree in Philology, she returned to her birthplace with an ambition to "become" Japanese. To this end, she took a job as an interpreter for a large company in Tokyo, an ultimately humiliating and soul-sapping experience relayed powerfully in Fear and Trembling (2003). The novel, which skewers the rigid hierarchies and behavioral codes of the Japanese corporate world, features a young woman who is deemed to make every possible blunder in her job, leading to several demotions until finally she is forced to be a toilet attendant. Blackly hilarious, Fear and Trembling won the Grand Prix du roman du l'Académie Française, was made into a movie and has sold more than a million copies, although a couple of commentators in Japan accused Nothomb of caricaturing to the point of racism. (Naturally, she claims to have exaggerated nothing.)

Her latest novel to appear in English has proved her most controversial yet. Sulphuric Acid, published in France in 2005 and now available from Faber & Faber in a translation by Shaun Whiteside, is a bizarre parable about a reality show based upon the Holocaust.

On the first page of Sulphuric Acid, "contestants" are abducted at random off the street and taken to a concentration camp, where they're either put to work or killed. The camp, we're told, is like the ones used for the Nazi deportations, with one "notable exception." There are cameras everywhere, and the victims soon realize that what they're experiencing is a TV show.

Concentration achieves the highest viewing figures in the history of television: "The public roared for more, from the very first broadcast." Eventually, when the ratings plateau, the program-makers decide to boost interest with audience interaction, and so, each episode, viewers are asked to "vote off" two prisoners to be executed. The ploy works: everyone participates, and ratings jump again until 100 percent of the population is watching.

The star of the show is a beautiful 20-year-old woman named Pannonique — or as she's known in the camp, CKZ 114 — who, despite the deprivation, hunger and violence she's forced to endure, remains inscrutably stoical (she's aware that any reaction is "telegenic"). Kapo Zdena — a woman Pannonique's age, but with none of her beauty or grace — falls swiftly in love with her, as do the viewers and the other captives. Indeed, Pannonique is less a character than a shining symbol of goodness, a point emphasized by the introduction of her foil, a malevolent old crone designated — no joke — ZHF 911.

Other themes are developed with a similar lack of subtlety: our species' capacity for obediently complying with a chain of command to harm or kill — investigated in the famous experiments of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram, and the topic of renewed debate since the barbarities of Abu Ghraib — is alluded to unnervingly when the television executives discuss how to orchestrate the viewer voting system:

Shall we broadcast a very expensive phone number?

Even better: do it with teletext. It's much better if the viewer can sort out everything with his remote control. He only has to type in the three letters and the three digits of the number of the person he wants to eliminate.

Even committing murder can be incorporated into the mindless passivity of watching television, and it's this docility — the complicit acceptance of any manner of degrading entertainment — that Nothomb seems most eager to parody with Concentration's unparalleled popularity and Pannonique's insistence that the audience, not the show's producers, nor the politicians who allow it to continue, are the guilty ones: "The final responsibility," she tells her fellow prisoners, "lies with those who agree to watch a spectacle they could just as easily reject."

Eventually, Pannonique offers herself in a Christ-like sacrifice: she demands that the viewers unanimously vote for her execution, and only then will they be granted absolution for their crimes.

If Sulphuric Acid is less successful than Nothomb's previous works, it's not because the concept is tasteless — perhaps it is, but her worthy intention is clear — nor even due to the bash-you-over-the-head nature of the satire. Rather, it is a problem of characterization. Her stories are usually so cerebral and whimsical, and focused on a character's internal life, that a lack of physical evocation and characterization beyond a central figure — more often than not Nothomb's alter ego — doesn't much matter. Here, however, the reader needs more visceral impressions of the horror of a concentration camp, and its supposed prisoners, in order meaningfully to engage and feel tension regarding their plight. We're informed that it's smelly, and cold, and that there's a constant threat of death, but Nothomb neither vivifies scenes nor develops characters sufficiently, and what results is a coldly intellectual, rather than an emotional, reaction from the reader.

Still, the subject matter allows Nothomb to riff on her favorite ideas: hunger, megalomania and, of course, the frustrations and complexities of love. As so often in her stories, an obsessive and manipulative relationship between two females — in this case the guard Zdena and the saintly Pannonique — takes center stage. Given the opportunity to save herself by succumbing to Zdena's advances, Pannonique refuses, leading Zdena to reflect that by "balking so at the idea of giving me what is given so easily ... she attracts me so powerfully that I could die." Immediately, a "flush of joy filled the whole of her being." And so, regardless of Sulphuric Acid's fervent cultural critique, its slamming satire, we find ourselves yet again imbibing Nothomb's most fundamental philosophy: that a person is not truly alive unless lovelorn, starving, exiled or somehow in the realm of superhunger — which, as she rhapsodized in The Life of Hunger, "is not the possibility of more pleasure, it's the possession of the very principle of bliss: infinity."

— Emma Garman (emma_garman@hotmail.com)