First Blood
Inspired by the life of the author’s father, First Blood is an elegiac imagining of Patrick Nothomb’s early life and near-brush with death in Africa. In 1964, Patrick is 28 years old and a Belgian diplomat in the Congo, stationed at Stanleyville (now Kisangani), when he and thousands of others are taken hostage by Congolese rebels.
The novel begins as he faces a firing squad, musing on his last moments and feeling a sense of relief that after four months of nonstop negotiations “at last I’ll be able to fall silent.” Then Patrick’s mind transports him to his early childhood, one that is haunted by the absence of his soldier father (killed in a freak training accident) and his even more absent mother, Claude, who is so damaged by her husband’s death that she agrees to let her parents raise him. Nothomb devastatingly portrays the young Patrick’s longing for his enigmatic mother, who keeps away while his grandmother delights at having “a new little doll to pamper.” Grandfather soon sends him off to spend time with the Nothomb family to help toughen him up, and Patrick learns what is to be a child, despite the “horde of Huns”—his aunts and uncles not much older than he—who test him at every turn. Falling in love with the Nothomb chateau nestled deep in the Ardennes, Patrick learns more of his father from his siblings and returns repeatedly to frolic with the “tornado of tall children.”
The passage of time accelerates quickly, yet Nothomb’s vignettes of Patrick’s journey into adulthood are humorous and delightful. First Blood is a powerful tale told with grace, eloquence, and a daughter’s deep empathy for her father (who died at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic).
