Archive for the ‘Marie NDiaye’ Category

The Witch

April 8, 2026

It is a pleasure to see Marie Ndiaye on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, particularly as it is only a couple of years since she missed out on being selected at all for Vengeance is Mine, also translated by Jordan Stump, which was certainly superior to a number of the chosen books. Vengeance is Mine was a recent novel (2022) whereas The Witch dates from as long ago as 1996, but both share the intention of making the reader increasingly uneasy while at the same time offering no resolution. The Witch is not a metaphorical title, and the novel opens with Lucie initiating her twin daughters, Maud and Lise, in the “mysterious powers” they possess which have barely manifested in their mother but will prove much more potent in their hands:

“My abilities were in all honesty laughable, they allowed me to see trivialities, nothing more.”

The plot, if indeed it is fair to describe the events in Ndiaye’s novel as a plot, kicks in when Lucie’s husband, Pierrot, brings home a visitor, a Monsieur Matin: “he’ll be having dinner with us and possibly spending the night.” Monsieur Matin, it transpires, has left his wife:

“I’m only there to drive the car and bring home money, how long is a man supposed to live like that nowadays?”

Monsieur Matin soon exits the novel (through a window when his wife appears to pick him up), but it is not long after that Pierrot leaves for his mother’s and does not return. More worryingly, he takes with him a large sum of money given to Lucie by her father which her father now needs returned as it was not strictly his to give away. Lucie, however, is more concerned with getting her mother and father to agree to see each other again as they have recently separated, making both promise to do so even though neither is particularly keen. Superficially this might seem like the start of a relationship comedy but that is not how it feels as Ndiaye tends to keep character motives oblique and their behaviour can therefore seem strange and unsettling (why Pierrot leaves, for example, is never entirely clear).

Much of the novel focuses on relationships between parents and children. Monsieur Matin complains that his son only cares about his mother describing him as “the little beast who hates me”; Pierrot describes his daughters as “filthy little witches”; and Isabelle, a neighbour, is indifferent to her son, Steve, trailing him round Paris looking for a boarding school, “the child still clinging to her leg seemed to weigh no more than a little pile of clothes.” On the other hand, Lucie’s mother-in-law cannot wait for her daughter to have a child:

“How I hope it will be a girl… Oh, I’d make dresses for her. And all Lili’s outfits, you know, all the clothes she wore as a child, I’ve kept them all, I never gave a single one away, because I knew this day would come.”

When Lucie catches glimpses of the future she cries tears of blood, but blood isn’t thicker than water in this novel, as family relationships prove brittle, often breaking when one individual feels contempt for another.

The supernatural undercurrent runs throughout the novel, with Maud and Lise apparently able to transform themselves into birds and Lucie’s mother also able to transmute others. Alongside this are other more natural but equally strange transformations when Lucie encounters Pierrot and Isabelle again, positions reversed – Pierrot is now stuck in the domestic sphere, living with another woman and two young children, whereas Isabelle, now unencumbered with Steve, has started her own business, a Woman’s University for Spiritual Health, in which she asks Lucie to take classes. Lucie is a still point among numerous characters who not only change but accept that change, her determination that her mother and father get back together (which will have unintended consequences) only one sign of this. It also indicates her inability to change the world around her – Pierrot leaving, her daughters finding their own path – which could be seen as a echo of her feeble ‘witch’ powers.

As is common with NDiaye’s work, The Witch entices the reader into its strange world but feels little need to explain itself. Its combination of domesticity and witchcraft is appealing but some readers may find its conclusion unsatisfying as there is no attempt at a resolution. The work itself, however, is delightfully unsettling.

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Books of the Year 2024 Part 2

December 24, 2024

Vengeance is Mine by Marie Ndiaye

My first book of 2024 was actually published in 2023 (in a translation by Jordan Stump) but as it has already been unfairly neglected by the International Booker Prize this year, I felt could not ignore it. Marie Ndiaye’s Vengeance is Mine is perhaps her best novel yet, as disquieting as what has gone before but more focused. It begins when Gilles Principaux walks into the office of Maitre (an honorific title of a lawyer) Susane, our narrator, requesting that she represent his wife, Marlynne, who is awaiting trial after killing their three young children. Susane is certain she recognises Principaux from a childhood visit to his home where her mother worked – a glimpse into middleclass life that has motivated her own elevation. What happened during that visit is never entirely clear, but it unlocks a subtle exploration of class which also encompasses Susane’s relationship with her (illegal) immigrant housekeeper, Sharon. Children also feature heavily: the three murdered children, her own childhood memory, the children of her housekeeper and her ex-boyfriend (and only friend). Can we really look after them? It is a novel with more questions than answers which is exactly why it is so wonderful.

The Singularity by Balsam Karam

The Singularity by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel) tells the story of two women who lose a child: in one case the child is an adult, in the other an unborn baby. Both women are refugees, but their stories are very different – the novel suggesting that this difference is largely one of luck and circumstance. The women only coincide briefly at the moment of the first woman’s suicide while the other is pregnant. If the novel only told both their stories it would be enough but in the section titled ‘The Singularity’, the two stories merge into one in an example of experimental form both enhancing the reading experience and the understanding of the reader.  At one point the pregnant woman, who will lose her baby, says, “I come from a tradition of loss,” (she also reflects on a lost childhood friend when her family leave her home country) a statement that is perhaps central to the refugee experience which this novel reflects so powerfully.

Verdigris by Michele Mari

In Verdigris (translated by Brian Robert Moore) Michelin, a thirteen-year-old boy, befriends the elderly gardener, Felice, at his grandfather’s house. Michelin is a lonely child who lives largely in his imagination, but the relationship is one of genuine affection, with the added intrigue of Felice’s erratic and incomplete memories via which the boy attempts to reconstruct the history of the house. The novel is set in 1969 and this journey into the past will take us back to the Second World War amid Felice’s claims that the bodies of SS soldier are to be found on the property. On one level, then, it is a detective story, but the detective work takes place in the unreliable memories of the gardener. The unusual relationship is enhanced by the translator’s brave decision to render Felice’s dialect using an English equivalent, contrasting with Michelin’s rather literary speech. A delight from beginning to end, it is also a meditation on memory – both at the level of the individual and the nation.

Un Amor by Sara Mesa

Un Amor marks the first appearance of Sara Mesa in the UK, though it is the fifth of her books to be translated into English (by Katie Whittemore). Her novels often present morally ambiguous situations which force the reader to question their initial estimation of characters, and Un Amor is no exception. Nat is a woman who has left her job in the city (under uncertain circumstances) to live in the country – not in bucolic rural England, of course, but unforgiving, arid Spain – in a rundown shack which she rents from an unfriendly and unreliable landlord. When she asks an older neighbour, Andreas, to fix the roof, he asks if she will sleep with him in return. And so begins a relationship which never quite develops in the way we might assume. Nat’s character is deliberately difficult to pin down and seems likely to prompt differing reactions for different readers, making this the ideal book for discussion.

Hungry for What by Maria Bastaros

Without doubt my favourite short story collection of the year comes from another Spanish writer, Maria Bastaros (translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn). In the title story ‘hungry’ is taken quite literally as a woman labels her sandwich ‘do not take’ at work only to find herself following the instruction until the sandwich begins to blossom into an unusual form of plant life. Elsewhere, ‘hungry’ applies to characters’ desires and dreams which often turn out to be dangerous: for example, a birthday wish in one story culminates in a mother’s kidnap; in another, a father’s desire for promotion has consequences for his daughters. Over the course of thirteen stories, Bastaros demonstrates that there is little dividing line between our dreams and our nightmares. Hopefully her novel, Historia de España contada a las niñas (History of Spain Told to Girls) will soon follow this collection into English.

The Brass Age by Slobodan Snajder

Slobodan Snajder is a Croatian writer perhaps best know s a dramatist. However, his 2015 novel The Brass Age, has won numerous awards and is now available in English thanks to distinguished translator Celia Hawkesworth. It begins in 1759 with Georg Kempf’s departure from Germany to the fringes of the Hapsburg Empire and ends with the formation of Yugoslavia, but it is largely about the Second World War in eastern Europe. When the original Kempf’s descendant (also George) is conscripted into the German army he gets as far as Poland before an order to take part in a firing squad sees him desert to join the Polish resistance. Numerous adventures follow, all the while accompanied by the commentary of his as yet unborn son. A monumental novel, which deserved far more attention than it got when it was published earlier his year, about individual lives caught in the tides of history.

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Vengeance in Mine

August 8, 2024

Marie Ndiaye’s latest novel, Vengeance is Mine (translated by Jordan Stump) is perhaps her most disquieting and intense yet. It begins when Gilles Principaux walks into the office of Maitre (an honorific title of a lawyer) Susane requesting that she represent his wife, Marlynne, who is awaiting trial after killing their three young children. Susane is convinced that she knows Principaux, believing him to be “the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time, long ago, in a Cauderan house” and cannot think of any other reason he would have come to her:

“I who am not a lawyer known throughout Bordeaux, particularly given the seriousness of the case.”

The memory, presented initially as “luminous” and “the happiest moment of her life”, will grow in ambiguity as the novel progresses. The original meeting took place when Susane was ten and Principaux (if he is, indeed, who she thinks he is) was fifteen when her mother took her to a house where she was employed to iron. They never met again, and her mother can no longer remember the house or even the name with any certainty. Susane regards the meeting, which allowed her a glimpse into the lives of the middle classes, as the reason she became a lawyer, and her mother encouraged her to go with the boy “aiming to lift her daughter high above her own station.”

Susane’s life is further complicated by her housekeeper, Sharon, an immigrant she helping to achieve legal status, whom she employs “as an act of militancy, to help further a cause I support” but whose presence in her house makes her feel “uncomfortable” as she cannot accommodate herself to their employer / employee relationship wishing for a stronger, purer bond:

“I’ll never let you down, Sharon, believe in me, thought Susane as hard as she could.”

This is not only revealing in terms of the unexpected importance she places on their relationship, but also in demonstrating the intensity of Susane’s feelings which she rarely communicates.  As the reader is locked into her point of view, the narrative itself can be uncomfortably claustrophobic as we are hemmed in by the ferocity of the character’s emotions with no outlet.

The same applies when considering her difficult relationship with her parents, a difficulty that is similarly caused by a love that is demanding both of others and herself:

“She loved them so!

“And how it hurt to love them, sometimes!”

When she questions her mother about Principaux she knows “she was trying to tease out a truth that was secretly what she’d come looking for, not knowing of that truth would be good for her.” To what extent her obsession with this early memory is to blame for the uncomfortable nature of her relationship the reader must decide (though the novel is at pains to avoid any clarity of cause and effect). Her only friend is an ex-boyfriend, Rudy, whose young daughter, Lily, Susane’s parents sometimes look after.

Children, and their need for love and protection, is a recurring theme in the novel. When Rudy asks Sharon to look after Lily, Susane worries about her safety even though she suggested it. (Lily’s mother is largely absent, another adult who does not accept the responsibility of protecting their child – though it is also hinted that Susane may be the mother). The murder of Principaux’s children raises the question of whether Marlynne alone can be blamed or whether her husband’s “strange coldness” makes her seem “less blameworthy than the father with his surprising reactions.” He certainly seems to be more concerned with his wife (who does not want to see him) than he is with his loss. And behind all of this is the memory that Susane holds dear, and the suspicion that there is more to it she cannot remember – perhaps she, too, was not protected.

All this may make Vengeance is Mine seem like a difficult novel to love, yet its hypnotic prose carries the reader along with an unyielding tension. On the rare occasions we escape Susane’s viewpoint, it is to encounter the other characters in statements such as they might give in a court, with each individual trapped in their own version of events. As is often the case with Ndiaye’s novels, it veers unexpectedly towards the end but on this occasion, it does not lose focus. It is easy to see why John Self selected it as one of the best translated novels of 2023.

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Self Portrait in Green

June 12, 2022

Anyone approaching Marie Ndiaye’s Self Portrait in Green (translated by Jordan Stump in 2014 and now released in the UK by Influx Press) expecting straight-forward autobiography will be, at the very least, disconcerted – a not uncommon occurrence when it comes to her writing in general. While the slim volume clearly draws on her own life with references to friends and family, its content is deliberately restricted and, at times, surreal, as if she intends to draw on only one aspect of herself, one self-portrait among the many possible.

The book begins ominously in 2003 as the village where Ndiaye is living in France faces the prospect of the Garonne River bursting its banks:

“It’s the first thing you learn when you make up your mind to settle in this place, eternally under threat from the floodwaters of the Garonne.”

NDiaye insists the river is ‘feminine’ and the same sense of being under threat from the ‘feminine’ follows her throughout the book, even as we go back through time to 2002 and 2001. (The carefully dated narrative feels more like a defiance of chronology than an attempt to establish it as the story, in many ways, refutes the ordering of cause and effect). This ‘feminine’ presence is portrayed throughout as a ‘green woman,’ first seen as she takes her children to and from school:

“…never once did my gaze fail to meet with the still, watchful silhouette of the woman in green standing near the far more imposing banana tree…”

The children, of course, see nothing. The woman reminds her of another “woman in green” from her school days:

“Tall, brutal, and heavyset, she promises us all a trip to prison if we eat too slowly, if we dirty our clothes, if we don’t raise our eyes to meet hers.”

Then there is a conversation with her friend Cristina, also dressed in green, about Cristina’s children – despite the fact Cristina has no children. Cristina tells her about arriving to collect her children from their grandparents only to overhear her father repeating to her mother, “I can’t take them anymore, I can’t take them anymore…” This dreamlike conversation is the first indication that the ‘green woman’ might represent some nightmarish version of Ndiaye herself.

The following sections of the book focus largely on her father and her friend, Jenny. Ndiaye did not meet her father until she was fifteen and he is portrayed in the book as an inconsistent man moving from place to place, job to job and woman to woman. Throughout the book he is married to a woman who was once the narrator’s friend. She is now a ’woman in green’ having altered her brown eyes with green contact lenses:

“I feared that my father and the woman in green might have child of their own, or two, or three, and that would only compound my father’s problems, engulfing all of us, those of his children who feel it in our hearts when some sorrow befalls him.”

Later she visits her father in Burkina Faso “to put my affection for my father to the test.” Part of the distance between them is her father’s disapproval of her vocation:

“He looks on literature with loathing and contempt you understand.”

In establishing herself as a writer she sees herself in opposition to her stepmother, certain that she “abandoned her vocation, her free will, her joyousness, just to become one with this man.” Again, there is a sense that her friend, now her stepmother, represents an alternative route for her – marrying a man like her father – that she fears. Similarly, another friend, Jenny, who, at fifty, finds herself abandoned by her husband and her son, and forced to move back in with her parents:

“She’s a passive and trusting person, and nothing she’d done was really to blame for this ruination.”

She begins an affair with an old boyfriend, Ivan, but it is Ivan’s wife, not Jenny, who is the ‘woman in green’. She befriends Jenny and talks about her life with Ivan, the life Jenny could have had. Jenny finds herself “growing small, transparent and empty.” Eventually Jenny becomes suicidal.

What Ndiaye intends with these insights into the lives of other women is not entirely obvious – our journey through their stories is poetic rather than logical, particularly as they flit in and out of the narrator’s life. Ndiaye’s writing always contains a dreamlike quality and it is as if she takes moments from her daily life and transmutes them into something slightly less real but more intense. Self Portrait in Green does not reveal much of Ndiaye’s biography, but it does tell us what it feels like it be her through these other women who haunt her, displaying the doubts and fears she lives with. Perhaps, like the river, they threaten to overwhelm her – but, just as the Garonne subsides at the end, so she controls her fears: when her children see the black creature she spotted earlier she tells them: “To tell the truth, I didn’t see anything. Nothing at all.”

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Ladivine

April 7, 2016

ladivine

Ladivine by Marie NDiaye (translated by Jordan stump) is another major novel by a woman writer on the Man Booker International Prize long list. It begins with Clarisse Riviere on her monthly visit to her mother – not as Clarisse, but as Malinka. Clarisse is a name and identity she has taken for herself which she keeps separate from her mother, as she does her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Ladivine. This decision seems based on a deep-rooted feeling rather than any reason: since childhood she has felt that “being that woman’s daughter filled her with a horrible shame and fear.” So reluctant is she to acknowledge the relationship that when asked by another pupil at school who the woman who has come to collect her is, she replies, “My servant.”

“All trace of repulsion vanished from the girl’s face, and she let out a satisfied and admiring little ‘Oh!’
And Malinka realised that disgust would have spread to this girl’s very body, she would have trembled and recoiled in a sort of horror, if Malinka had answered, ‘My mother.’”

Her mother’s identity is now also changed, and she is frequently referred to in the narrative as “the servant.”

“Nothing said she had to go on being the servant’s daughter forever, she told herself.”

Are we to assume her decision to disown her mother is partly racial? The name Malinka betrays her African origin, but Clarisse is described as “pale, smooth-skinned.” Does this explain her boss’s comment when her mother turns up at the restaurant where she waitresses after leaving school: “I hope she’s not going to make a habit of coming here. That wouldn’t be good for business.”

Clarisse, as we know from the opening pages, meets and marries Richard Riviere and they have a daughter, Ladivine – named after Clarisse’s mother, a woman she will never allow her daughter to meet, suggesting she cannot escape her past entirely. Clarisse’s two separate lives, however, makes it difficult for her to commit entirely to either, as if her two identities cancel each other out, and she finds herself becoming distanced from her new family:

“Even before silence invaded their house, a polite, cosy, placid silence, she had already closed her ears to the things Richard Riviere and Ladivine said, though she pretended to listen…”

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Only one third of the way through do we reach Ladivine’s story, on holiday with her husband, Marko, and two young children, Daniel and Annika, in a country which remains unnamed but which we might assume is the home of the original Ladivine. Once again, NDiaye moves from the present into the past in order to explain Ladivine’s journey to this point. Marko is German and Ladivine now lives in Germany as if to emphasise each generation adopting their own identity, their own language. This vacation represents a break from Marko’s parents where they normally holiday, again raising the idea of generational discord.

The holiday takes place in an uneasy, uncomfortable atmosphere, from Ladivine being mistaken more than once for a guest at a wedding, to a museum full of atrocities:

“…huge canvases very realistically depicted various massacres – here a squadron of soldiers armed with bayonets skewering wild-eyed rioters, here three men slicing intently into the belly of a living woman pathetically endeavouring with blood-soaked hands to protect the foetus contained in that belly…”

This culminates in an act of violence by Marko (a scene which literally caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up) which causes them to leave their hotel and stay with friends of Ladivine’s father, Richard. Throughout this we see Ladivine drifting from her family just as her mother and grandmother did before her.

What begins as an examination of family relationships, particularly between mothers and daughters, becomes something much more unsettling as Ladivine’s interpretation of events becomes increasingly dreamlike (or nightmarish). This begins with the idea that a dog she spots every time she leaves the hotel is waiting for her:

“Still, she was by no means sure the dog meant her well, she never approached it, never waved at it, never even met its gaze.”

Dogs are a recurrent motif in the novel, first seen when Richard’s parents bring a dog with them on a visit, and it is found lying next to Ladivine in her cot:

“Yet Clarisse had the strong sense of a bond not to be rashly broken, a secret union with no immediate danger to the child.”

Richard disagrees and we see the first fracture ion their relationship. The dog motif is important enough to provide the novel with its conclusion, and demonstrates NDiaye’s intention to write something which reaches beyond psychological study. Clarisse’s treatment of her mother, and Ladivine’s actions on holiday are portrayed as unavoidable, just like Richard’s father’s purchase of the dog:

“It’s an order come to life… I had no choice.”

Perhaps the animal spirit of the dog is a sign to both Clarisse and Ladivine that the past cannot be disowned.

Ladivine is not an easy novel – its prose style can be stand-offish, its characters act without clear motivation, and it is no respecter of genre, playing tag with realism like a wayward child. Its very awkwardness, however, is a reflection of NDiaye’s unforgiving intensity. Women writers may be in a minority on the Man Booker International Prize long list, but it would not surprise me if that were to be reversed by the short list.

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Three Strong Women

August 7, 2015

three strong women

Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye is a novel of (unsurprisingly, perhaps) three parts; less expected is the fact that the central character is a woman in only two of them. All three tell of characters suspended between France and Senegal: NDiaye herself has a French mother and a Senegalese father – a father who returned to the continent when she was only one year old, perhaps explain why her own characters’ lives seem determined by their journeys between these two places. As each section in some way explores the relationship between Europe and Africa, so too does it examine the relationship between a man and a woman, relationships where communication is often fractured and failing.

In the first section Norah, a lawyer, leaves the life she has created for herself in France – her recently moved in lover remains behind to look after her daughter along with his own – to visit her father at his request. Once a powerful man who bullied those around him, he is reduced to a feeble glutton who takes every opportunity to fill his face with food. Norah is most worried about her brother – while she and her sister were brought up by her mother in France after her parents relationship broke down, he was taken by her father to be raised in Senegal. She soon discovers that her brother is, in fact, the reason for her father’s call – he is in prison, awaiting trial after confessing to the murder of her father’s lover.

In the second section the viewpoint moves to that of kitchen salesman Rudy. He met his wife, Fanta, while teaching in Senegal but, after an incident which brought his classroom career to an end, selfishly convinced her to come to France, though he knew she would be unable to work as a teacher there. He hates his present job and is aware that his marriage is in danger of falling apart – so much so that he plans to collect his son and take him to his mother’s for the night so his wife cannot leave him – but he feels powerless in the face of his problems, reacting only with an uncontrollable rage which exacerbates every situation.

In the final section we return to Senegal and follow the journey of Khady, a young woman attempting to reach Europe after her deceased husband’s family tell her she must go. Abandoning the idea of crossing by sea as too dangerous, she is befriended by a young man, Lamine, who has decided to undertake the journey by land.

The three sections have the slightest of connections: Norah’s father has made his wealth through a holiday village in Dara Salam, a business Rudy father was also involved in; Khady is first seen as a servant at Norah’s father’s house, and is told to contact Fanta should she make it to France. These connections, however, are not important to our understating of the stories, which could easily be read as three novellas. Placing the three parts within a novel seems intended to encourage the reader to develop their own connections.

In all three relationships have broken down. Norah resents her father; her father avoids communication (two girl she claims are his daughters stay with him, but he does not speak to them). Every time Rudy attempts to communicate with Fanta they argue:

“…she had inflicted upon herself the absurd obligation of spending the rest of her days in a house she disliked, beside a man she shunned and who from the outset had deceived her as to what he really was…”

Khady has no relationships left – her husband is dead and his family do not want her. The relationship which seems the most loving is that she develops with Lamine as he demonstrates his selflessness again and again – however, this is the relationship where the greatest betrayal takes place.

Despite this it can be argue that all three stories end with sense of peace. NDiaye uses bird imagery to achieve this in each one. Norah’s father is associated with “the lush, wilting vegetation of the flame tree” – “whatever flame tree, exhausted by flowering, he had flown down from.” The end finds him in its branches:

“…his daughter Norah was there, close by, perched among the branches that were now bereft of flowers… Why would she come and alight on the flame tree if not to make peace, once and for all?”

Rudy, as his world falls apart around him, finds himself stalked by a buzzard:

“With its wings spread out along the windscreen, its head turned to one side, it glared at him with its horridly severe yellow eye.”

Towards the story’s end he experiences an epiphany regarding his mother; shortly after his son tells him, “We’ve run a bird over.” The final section also uses a bird in order to create a sense of peace at the story’s conclusion:

“With staring eyes she saw a bird with long grey wings hovering above the fence. ‘It’s me, Khady Demba,’ she thought, dazed by the revelation, knowing that she was the bird and that the bird knew it too.”

The three sections may not cohere or even resonate particularly powerfully, but the writing in each of them is superb. The central section, in particular, where NDiaye conveys Rudy’s frustrations with great skill and sympathy, is utterly absorbing. She is clearly a writer who can inhabit different characters, different worlds, with ease.

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