It happened that I went to see Taxi Tehran at The Projector just before I picked up Amelie Nothomb’s Life Form at the library.

The two incidents were entirely unconnected. In the early 2000s like everyone else in the Anglophone reading-sphere I enthusiastically read Amelie Nothomb (droll, playfully intellectual, irreverent with a touch of vulnerability) and was like everyone else greatly charmed and amused. (I never however got to Loving Sabotage, which was why for years I understood the title as Verb + Object (Talking about O’Dwyer, Saving Private Ryan) until I recently came across the original title, Le Sabotage Amoreux.) But I did not feel the need to consume everything in her oeuvre. I read two or three of them, moved on, and thought nothing of her for years. But in the library (where I’d gone in for a new Nooteboom) NOO was next to NOT, and there were two Nothombs I’d never realised existed (at that time, I had not known she published one novel every single Autumn since her first in 1992, and this prolific but rationed talent meant as many new books in as many years that I’d ceased to read her.) I would revisit her, I thought.

They go oddly together, the film and the book. Both feature as central figures a fictionalised version of the author/director as her/himself, riding on autobiography as much as fame, and are something between fiction and mock-documentary, deceptively light and but dramatising in different voices poignant points about Iran and censorship in one and Iraq and the American war in the other. And in both the abrupt ending, a joke on the viewer/reader, an absurd, insouciant emergency exit.