Attentat is a novel by Belgian author Amélie Nothomb. It was first published in 1997.
In Attentat, the novelist creates two original characters for her readers. The grotesque yet enlightened Epiphane Otos both refined and vulnerable and Ethel, a smart young actress, portrayed as incredibly beautiful. The story is about Epiphane's love and devotion to Ethel. It is also a pretext for discourse on the idea of societal norms. Like in all books by Amélie Nothomb, literary and artistic references abound (for example Notre Dame de Paris). The use of little known vocabulary is equally an essential style trait of this novelist's work. [1]
All the author's ideas support the debate she puts forward on normality. What is a norm? What is the role, involuntary or not, played by society in the elaboration of such standards? Amélie Nothomb skillfully demonstrates depictions of beauty and ugliness throughout the dialogue between Epiphane and Ethel: We are thrown by others views, shaped by them. On a wider scale, Amélie Nothomb invites us to question our philosophies and core beliefs, through the character of Epiphane Otos. Are one's views on a given topic, fact, or idea a result of personal reflection or the absorption of a societal concept which has not yet been refuted?
Some minor oversights are present in this work. One example is where the author writes, "the square of my hypotenuse was equal to the sum of my right angles," whereas the square of the hypotenuse should be equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides. In another quote, "it was six o'clock in the morning in Japan therefore 2pm at Ethel's" is erroneous even if it is not specified whether she lives in France or Belgium We do know however that the location is in Europe, somewhere west of Germany, thanks to a fax written by Epiphane during the journey to Japan which indicated the countries on the flight path. So the Time zone difference with Japan is not correctly calculated. In January, the month in which the action occurs, it is in fact 10pm in France or Belgium while it is already 6am the next day in Japan.
The impaling scene was inspired by a music video called Sans Logique by Mylène Farmer who is known to the novelist.
A Pythagorean triple consists of three positive integers a, b, and c, such that a2 + b2 = c2. Such a triple is commonly written (a, b, c), and a well-known example is (3, 4, 5). If (a, b, c) is a Pythagorean triple, then so is (ka, kb, kc) for any positive integer k. A primitive Pythagorean triple is one in which a, b and c are coprime (that is, they have no common divisor larger than 1). For example, (3, 4, 5) is a primitive Pythagorean triple whereas (6, 8, 10) is not. A triangle whose sides form a Pythagorean triple is called a Pythagorean triangle, and is necessarily a right triangle.
A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices A, B, and C is denoted .
In geometry, two figures or objects are congruent if they have the same shape and size, or if one has the same shape and size as the mirror image of the other.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. However, the probability that monkeys filling the entire observable universe would type a single complete work, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given enough time.
In mathematics, the Euclidean distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a line segment between the two points. It can be calculated from the Cartesian coordinates of the points using the Pythagorean theorem, therefore occasionally being called the Pythagorean distance. These names come from the ancient Greek mathematicians Euclid and Pythagoras, although Euclid did not represent distances as numbers, and the connection from the Pythagorean theorem to distance calculation was not made until the 18th century.
In mathematics, the triangle inequality states that for any triangle, the sum of the lengths of any two sides must be greater than or equal to the length of the remaining side. This statement permits the inclusion of degenerate triangles, but some authors, especially those writing about elementary geometry, will exclude this possibility, thus leaving out the possibility of equality. If x, y, and z are the lengths of the sides of the triangle, with no side being greater than z, then the triangle inequality states that
In geometry and trigonometry, a right angle is an angle of exactly 90 degrees or /2 radians corresponding to a quarter turn. If a ray is placed so that its endpoint is on a line and the adjacent angles are equal, then they are right angles. The term is a calque of Latin angulus rectus; here rectus means "upright", referring to the vertical perpendicular to a horizontal base line.
In mathematics and logic, a direct proof is a way of showing the truth or falsehood of a given statement by a straightforward combination of established facts, usually axioms, existing lemmas and theorems, without making any further assumptions. In order to directly prove a conditional statement of the form "If p, then q", it suffices to consider the situations in which the statement p is true. Logical deduction is employed to reason from assumptions to conclusion. The type of logic employed is almost invariably first-order logic, employing the quantifiers for all and there exists. Common proof rules used are modus ponens and universal instantiation.
Lagrange's four-square theorem, also known as Bachet's conjecture, states that every natural number can be represented as a sum of four non-negative integral squares. That is, the squares form an additive basis of order four.
A taxicab geometry or a Manhattan geometry is a geometry whose usual distance function or metric of Euclidean geometry is replaced by a new metric in which the distance between two points is the sum of the absolute differences of their Cartesian coordinates. The taxicab metric is also known as rectilinear distance, L1 distance, L1 distance or norm, snake distance, city block distance, Manhattan distance or Manhattan length. The latter names refer to the rectilinear street layout on the island of Manhattan, where the shortest path a taxi travels between two points is the sum of the absolute values of distances that it travels on avenues and on streets.
A pandiagonal magic square or panmagic square is a magic square with the additional property that the broken diagonals, i.e. the diagonals that wrap round at the edges of the square, also add up to the magic constant.
In mathematics, a square is the result of multiplying a number by itself. The verb "to square" is used to denote this operation. Squaring is the same as raising to the power 2, and is denoted by a superscript 2; for instance, the square of 3 may be written as 32, which is the number 9. In some cases when superscripts are not available, as for instance in programming languages or plain text files, the notations x^2 (caret) or x**2 may be used in place of x2. The adjective which corresponds to squaring is quadratic.
In elementary number theory, a centered square number is a centered figurate number that gives the number of dots in a square with a dot in the center and all other dots surrounding the center dot in successive square layers. That is, each centered square number equals the number of dots within a given city block distance of the center dot on a regular square lattice. While centered square numbers, like figurate numbers in general, have few if any direct practical applications, they are sometimes studied in recreational mathematics for their elegant geometric and arithmetic properties.
The Pythagorean trigonometric identity, also called simply the Pythagorean identity, is an identity expressing the Pythagorean theorem in terms of trigonometric functions. Along with the sum-of-angles formulae, it is one of the basic relations between the sine and cosine functions.
Baroness Fabienne Claire Nothomb, better known by her pen name Amélie Nothomb, is a Belgian Francophone novelist. Part of her childhood was spent in Asia.
A Pythagorean prime is a prime number of the form . Pythagorean primes are exactly the odd prime numbers that are the sum of two squares; this characterization is Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares.
In literary criticism, autofiction is a form of fictionalized autobiography.
In mathematics, a nonhypotenuse number is a natural number whose square cannot be written as the sum of two nonzero squares. The name stems from the fact that an edge of length equal to a nonhypotenuse number cannot form the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle with integer sides.

The Character of Rain is a 2000 short novel by the Belgian author Amélie Nothomb originally written in French. The English translated edition of the novel was published by Faber and Faber.
In mathematics, the Pythagorean theorem or Pythagoras' theorem is a fundamental relation in Euclidean geometry between the three sides of a right triangle. It states that the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides. This theorem can be written as an equation relating the lengths of the sides a, b and the hypotenuse c, often called the Pythagorean equation: