Marie NDiaye - Who are the green women? They are powerful (one is a disciplinarian teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost). They are seductive (one marries her best friend’s father). And they are unbearably personal (one is the author’s own mother).

Marie NDiaye, Self-Portrait in Green. Trans. by Jordan Stump. Two Lines Press, 2014.

Who are the green women? They are powerful (one is a disciplinarian teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost). They are seductive (one marries her best friend’s father). And they are unbearably personal (one is the author’s own mother).
They are all aspects of their creator: Marie NDiaye, an author celebrated worldwide as one of France’s leading writers. Here, in her own skewed take on the memoir, NDiaye combs through all the menacing, beguiling, and revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, and unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, and how those obsessions become us.

It seems there is no genre of writing Marie NDiaye will not make her own. Asked to write a memoir, she turned in this paranoid fantasia of rising floodwaters, walking corpses, eerie depictions of her very own parents, and the incessant reappearance of women in green. Just who are these green women? They are powerful (one was NDiaye’s disciplinarian grade-school teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost and may be visible only to the author). They are seductive (one stole a friend’s husband). And they are unbearably personal (one is NDiaye’s own mother). They are all, in their way, aspects of their creator, at once frightening, menacing, and revealing of everything submerged within the consciousness of this singular literary talent. A courageous, strikingly honest, and unabashedly innovative self-portrait, NDiaye’s kaleidoscopic look at the women in green is a revelation to us all — about how we form our identities, how we discover those things we repress, and how our obsessions become us.

Abstract : « It’s the evening and the Garonne River is rising hour after hour in the darkness ». Page after page, the water penetrates the text and the walls ; the banks become porous, permeable. Identities blend and confusion invades the text, the narrator and the reader…“You have to watch and wait”. Along with the rising waters, the narrator’s encounters with the women in green increase in timelessness, and exist as incarnations of the flooding Garonne. Autoportrait en vert (Green self portrait) by Mary Ndiaye is a work which, through its structure and writing, challenges the notions of literary, photographic, identity and normative genres by jeopardising and questioning our own representations of the world.
Keywords : Overflowing – Self-portrait – Women in green – Garonne – Photography
Résumé : « C’est le soir et le niveau de la Garonne monte heure après heure dans l’obscurité ». Page après page, l’eau pénètre le texte, et toutes les parois, les bords-dures deviennent poreuses, perméables. Les identités se mélangent et le trouble envahit le texte, la narratrice, le lecteur… « Il faut attendre et surveiller ». Au fil de la montée des eaux les rencontres de la narratrice avec les femmes en vert se multiplient dans un hors temps comme des incarnations de la Garonne en débordement, de changer de socle. Autoportrait en vert de Marie Ndiaye est un ouvrage qui par sa structure et par son écriture questionne les notions de genre littéraires, photographiques, identitaires, normatifs en mettant en danger et en doute nos propres représentations du monde.
Mots-clés : Débordement – Autoportrait – Femmes en vert – Genre – Garonne – Photographie. - Elsa Polverel

BORDEAUX, France - Marie NDiaye is very French, which may seem surprising. Not because she was born of a Senegalese father and a French mother, but because she writes novels and plays with a freedom and daring - some French critics even describe it as a sorcery - more often associated with authors from Africa, India and Latin America.

"I was born in central France," she explained. "My father left when I was very young, and I was raised in a nice neighborhood outside Paris. It was all fairly bourgeois. I was 22 when I first visited Africa. It was as foreign to me as China or India."
Yet in her work, this petite, soft-spoken mother of three enters a landscape haunted by cruelty, paranoia and retribution. That is true of many of her nine novels, including "Rosie Carpe," which won France's Prix Femina in 2001, as well as of her plays, among them "Papa Doit Manger," only the second play by a woman to be staged by the Comédie-Française.
It is also true of her first play, "Hilda," written in 1999, which will be presented in English at 59E59 Theaters starting Friday through Dec. 11 as part of the French theater festival in New York, Act French.
This one-act play satirizes Bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, for their devotion to comfortable living and left-leaning views. But it also explores one of Ms. NDiaye's favorite themes: people's need to control - even to devour - one another.
"Vampirism," she exclaimed with delight.
In fact, here, the ill-fated Hilda is so thoroughly consumed that she never even appears onstage.
Ms. NDiaye, (pronounced N-di-I-ye), 38, said she wrote "Hilda" as well as "Papa Doit Manger" as radio plays and was surprised when they were brought to the stage.
With "Hilda," this came about thanks to Laura Pels, a French-born New York producer who also owns the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris, where it was presented in 2001 and won the season's Grand Prix de la Critique. Ms. Pels also arranged for the play's translation into English by Erika Rundle and its American premiere in January with the American Conservatory Theater at the Zeum Theater in San Francisco.
That production, directed by Carey Perloff, is the one that is opening in New York, with Ellen Karas again in the role of Mrs. Lemarchand. Michael Earle will play Frank Meyer, and Brandy Burre appears as Corinne, Hilda's younger sister.
"At first, I couldn't imagine it being presented in a theater," Ms. NDiaye said. "I still think it is more of a radio play because there is little movement. It's all done with words."
It no doubt helps, though, that Ms. NDiaye is known for writing clearly: it is the world she visits that is psychologically complex.
In "Hilda," the très bourgeoise Mrs. Lemarchand has an all too familiar problem: she needs a woman to clean her house and care for her children. But by good fortune, she learns that Frank Meyer, a handyman, has a wife, Hilda, who should fit the bill nicely. She summons Frank and interrogates him about Hilda's cleanliness, reliability and appearance. "She's not too fat, is she, or sickly thin?" Mrs. Lemarchand asks nervously.
Frank can barely get in a word. Even after he is browbeaten into accepting her terms, Mrs. Lemarchand cannot stop talking, one moment proclaiming her socialist sense of equality ("I love my maids"), the next feeling sorry for herself ("It's so lonely with just the children").
Still, she has made up her mind. "It's so hard to find a maid these days who's not perverted or depressed, or irresponsible, terribly irresponsible," she laments. "I want a woman who is normal. I want Hilda."
So, of course, she gets Hilda and, yes, devours her.
Ms. NDiaye has turned her back on the cosmopolitan world of Paris. Since the early 1990's, she and her husband, Jean-Yves Cendrey, a writer, have opted for a pastoral life, first in rural Normandy, now in the tiny village of Barie on the banks of the Garonne River, 30 miles south of Bordeaux.
It is the isolation, perhaps, that has helped Ms. NDiaye be so productive. She recently took part in a new French translation of the Bible: she worked on the Books of Ruth and Judith. And now, at the same time she prepares a new novel, she is writing a screenplay with the French director Claire Denis.
Such undertakings might be intimidating for some writers. But what is evident is that Ms. NDiaye has never lacked confidence. She began writing stories when she was 12, though showed them to no one. In fact, no one had read the manuscript of "Quant au Riche Avenir," or "As for a Promising Future," until she mailed it to three French publishers in 1984. The next day, Jérôme Lindon of the French publishing house Éditions de Minuit arrived at her high school with a contract to sign. She was only 17.
"I can't say it changed my life because I was very young and I thought it was normal for a publisher to accept a first book," she recalled. "Recognition is not something I thought about. But I did not want an ordinary life. I didn't want to be a teacher, like my mother or my brother. I wanted a life that would be a bit special."
As a guide, she plunged into world literature, drawn first by Henry James and later counting Kafka, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, Juan Rulfo, Wole Soyinka among her favorites. Most recently, she said, she was impressed by "The Darling" by Russell Banks.
Her most recent book, "Self-Portrait in Green," has autobiographical elements, including a description of a painful reunion with her aged, blind Senegalese father, who returned to Africa when she was a child. But it is also peopled by mysterious women "in green" who appear and disappear - or perhaps do not even exist.
As so often with Ms. NDiaye's fiction, then, the line between real and imaginary is blurred. In her latest play, "Les Serpents," for instance, a boy is devoured by snakes. Or is he? "What's to prove that at any moment we only exist in someone else's dream?" she asked. - ALAN RIDING





Marie NDiaye, All My Friends. Trans. by Jordan Stump. Two Lines Press, 2012.  Read an excerpt

A moody and beautiful reflection on relationships, and how our idea of the world too often fails to match reality, All My Friends delivers five stories that probe the boundaries between individuals to mediate on how well we really know anybody, including ourselves. Written in hypnotic prose with characters both fully fleshed and unfathomable, All My Friends opens with the fraught love story of a man who has fallen for his housekeeper, his student of many years ago. Losing his grip as he feels his own family turning against him, he plots romance between the housekeeper and an old friend, whom he thinks is perfect for her. Later NDiaye gives us the harsh tale of a young boy longing to escape his life of poverty by becoming a sex slave—just like the beautiful young man that lived next door. And when a woman takes her mentally challenged son on a bus ride to the city, they both know that she’ll return, but he won’t. Chilling, provocative, and touching, this is an unflinching look at the personal horrors we fight every day to suppress—but in All My Friends they’re allowed to roam free.


Following her universally acclaimed American debut—Three Strong Women—French phenom Marie NDiaye returns with five intricately narrated stories showcasing characters both robustly real and emotionally unfathomable. All My Friends opens with the fraught story of a patriarch who is losing his grip on reality, even as he falls deeply in love with his former student, now his housekeeper. NDiaye further probes the enduring effects of past tragedies in “The Death of Claude François,” a striking dissection of the tug of war between a doctor and her impoverished patient over a dead husband.
Later, NDiaye gives us the harsh tale of a young boy longing to escape his life of poverty by becoming a sex slave—just like the beautiful young man that lived next door. The curt, Kafkaesque “Revelation” involves a woman who takes her mentally challenged son on a bus ride to the city: they both know that she’ll return, but he won’t. And in the claustrophobic, psychologically dense “Brulard’s Day,” NDiaye sweeps in and out of the confused, aggressive mind of a woman tottering between sanity and madness.
Chilling, provocative, and touching, All My Friends shows a master stylist using her unique gifts to render the personal horrors we fight every day to suppress—but in All My Friends they’re allowed to roam free.

It’s been long-held that literary realism serves to rouse the reader’s compassion. John Gardner’s widely read The Art of Fiction prescribes a style of storytelling predicated on humanism; writers are taught to render their characters’ worlds “sensually available” and imaginatively comprehensible for readers, as if one of fiction’s main goals were cultural reform: to convey a deep conviction in human virtue and to deepen the reader’s capacity to love others. Some writers have embraced the challenge of redeeming literature’s most despicable class, a category that includes working-class drunks (Carver) and suburban cheaters (Cheever), as well as self-absorbed fuckheads (Denis Johnson), misogynists (Updike), and murderers (Dostoyevsky). Not to mention Nabokov’s masterpiece Lolita, in which the pedophile Humbert Humbert is actually made sympathetic. It’s often said that writers bear the responsibility of humanizing others, in effect strengthening human bonds. This bond, between the reader and fictional characters, is considered so important that outside of literary circles, many readers use their personal attachments to evaluate works of fiction, thus propagating the thrill of connection.
French author Marie NDiaye steers clear of these values in her innovative story collection All My Friends. As the recipient of several of France’s most prestigious literary prizes over the last decade, including the Prix Goncourt, NDiaye will surely change the conversation on “likeable” characters and clear, clarifying narratives. All My Friends breaks all the rules that leave readers contented and happy. NDiaye’s characters are perversely misguided narcissists and her stories—unstable, ambiguous, jarring—play out the terminal uncertainty of our contemporary experience.
All My Friends comprises a mélange of meandering episodes that have no firm plot, but which end on jolting, cruel notes. Across five stories, NDiaye exposes the depravity of her characters, generally trapped and ineffectual misfits and misanthropes. Her characters suffer appalling humiliations until, in desperation, they prove themselves capable of tremendous violence towards others. In mesmerizing scenes of psychological breakdown, these characters achieve impressive transformations—rising in stature as they wreck the lives of who else but all their friends. In “Brulard’s Day,” an aging actress, Eve Brulard, dispassionately watches an intruder destroy the only possession her estranged husband has left in the world—and does nothing about it at the very scene that was supposed to promise the couple’s reconciliation. In “All My Friends,” a retired schoolteacher named Werner spends over a decade quietly humiliating his former student Severine, whom he has hired on as his maid, for no ostensible reason except to teach her a lesson. In “Revelation” we listen to a woman berate her son and treat him “little better than the dog of the house” for being “not so much insane as stupid, appallingly stupid,” moments before she intends to abandon him on a roadside (136-137).
Some readers may want to pity these characters for their precarious situations; but however pitiful they are, they swiftly knock down readers for their sympathies. NDiaye is at pains to discourage any soft attitudes towards her characters, who lack the least bit of moral decency needed to be deemed “relatable.” In All My Friends, survival in harsh, ruthless environments necessarily compromises one’s dignity. NDiaye’s characters are despicable because they lack the imagination to widen the circle of light on the stage of their concerns. Their moral dilemma is always the same stark choice between survival and dignity; their inability to imagine other alternatives prevents them from surviving with dignity. But their debasement should resonate with readers intensely, for their experiences underpin modern human drama. It can’t be denied that shameless self-absorption, the willful inability to perceive the self realistically, is celebrated in today’s culture. Marie NDiaye is simply writing from the confused aftermath of our solipsistic experience.
NDiaye’s portrayals of narcissists are absorbing and highly compelling in their ability to provoke cringing reactions, but this realism doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding her enigmatic characters. Their imaginations are so grandiose that their behaviors, often left unexplained, are totally out of step with the world we know. NDiaye does nothing to resolve our alienation. She renders a universe of anomie, in which no one is deserving of compassion—like the opportunistic Madame Mour of “The Boys,” who has no qualms about selling her teenager to a city pedophile to cut a paycheck. Many of NDiaye’s characters, in addition to being depraved, show signs of mental illness. Some verge on being conspicuously insane. In a mesmerizingly dark passage, a boy who can’t be older than twelve or thirteen longingly describes his fantasies of sexual slavery. Rene envies his neighbor, Anthony Mour, whose body was sold to an older woman:
From time to time the memory of a naked Anthony raced through his mind, gilded, exultant, displaying his teeth (whitened?), his legs spread wide in a virile stance, index finger upraised before his lips (plumped with silicone?), and nose (reshaped, slenderized?), as if mischievously swearing the viewer to secrecy. […] But why shouldn’t she have two boys around her to… To do what? Rene’s head was gently swimming. To serve her, to show her off at her best, to ease her sorrows, to love her deeply? “I can do anything,” murmured Rene, gripped by an uneasy vainglory, a tremulous joy. He’d always known he could make a gift of himself. (77)
It’s extremely difficult to write about morally reprehensible characters—just as few people would voluntarily spend an evening with someone they find utterly despicable, most readers would avoid submitting to a similarly abusive contract in a work of fiction. That NDiaye succeeds in this project speaks to her mastery. In All My Friends, readers won’t even realize that they’re in the company of the enemy until the very last hour, which unquestioningly will leave them feeling debauched. With her powerful, elegant writing, NDiaye arrests our imagination with ambiguous images (are the dogs wrestling in heat, or is the little one getting torn apart?) that divert our attention to all the wrong details. Sometimes she quietly parodies literary clichés to set up false expectations. “The Death of Claude Francois” appears to be about a love triangle, but is actually about a woman losing control of herself. In “The Boys,” we’re are led to believe that we’re witnessing an adoption, but it soon becomes clear that the story is about something much darker.
Characters consistently misrepresent themselves, too, often withholding details about shameful, incriminating histories. In “Brulard’s Day,” Eve Brulard never mentions her desertion of her family until her estranged husband appears. In another story, the “Death of Claude Francois,” Doctor Zaka appears so prim and forthright in the initial passages that we don’t suspect foul play, even as she’s endangering her child under our watch. This is typical of NDiaye’s characters, who are capable of making good first impressions, though in hindsight, certain ticks should have warned us.
Unreliable though they may be, NDiaye’s characters are never deliberately deceptive; they can’t help themselves. They are at such pains to forget their traumas that often they’re as stunned as we are when their enemies turn out to be their closest allies, and friends, strangers. Meanwhile, we readers believe what we’re told, despite mounting evidence that something is amiss. These conditions inspire a sort of fleeting, backstabbing romance between NDiaye’s readers and the fictional characters of All My Friends. As readers progress through a story, we are made to realize that all our earlier ideas were wrong, and we gradually rediscover these characters in their many incarnations. We figure out too late that we had been rallying for the wrong people. As you can imagine, this effect can be quite disorienting on readers in pursuit of knowing, or “relating to,” a character. In this way, the story collection works like an enchanted house with a series of trap doors and floors that disappear beneath you, a structure whose dimensions were misrepresented in the plans. It’s not only that we feel duped; it’s that we feel the rules of our rational world have been upended. We might feel like the residents of a small Cleveland neighborhood who discovered that their local school-bus driver, the friendly jazz musician who made quiet appearances at backyard barbeques, Ariel Castro, had been holding three women prisoner in his home for a decade.
NDiaye designs her stories to foster misunderstanding. In an interview with The Nervous Breakdown, Jordan Stump, the translator of All My Friends, has said that NDiaye’s collection “adamantly refuses to give away the context that would make her meaning entirely perceptible.” Concealed within the elegant design of these stories are twisting plot structures, unreliable narrators who periodically suffer from amnesia, and a narrative lens so shortsighted that the reader’s vision is drastically obstructed. People and events seem to brush up against us and we can’t figure out whether these sensations should please or horrify. NDiaye steers us straight towards the terror of discovering that everyone, especially all our friends, is just a hairsbreadth away from being completely unfathomable. - Jenn Mar

"NDiaye, who received France's most prestigious literary prize for Three Powerful Women and may be that nation's most startling new literary voice, brings to life an electrifying rogue's gallery of social outcasts, disgruntled wives, and loony strivers. . . . Stump's perfectly calibrated translation captures the rich timbre and fearsome bite of NDiaye's chiseled prose."— Publishers Weekly

"A superb short story collection. . . . Her oneiric tales suggest a necessary truth about contemporary life that explains why she is increasingly—and justly—recognized as a major world writer." — Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Woah. These stories are not linked, but the emotional force that pervades them is so consistent you feel that Marie NDiaye's fantastic characters belong together. This book is a world." — SF Weekly

"[NDiaye's] is a unique voice among other contemporary French writers, and her fictional vision both intricate and distinctive. She is an example of exactly the kind of non-Anglophone writer who should have already been translated in full. Hopefully, this new translation will renew interest in her work, prompt further translations and give English readers the chance to experience her entire contribution to world letters."— The Rumpus

"All five of the stories that make up this slim book are masterful. . . . NDiaye creates a portable unease that slips from one story to the next, never losing its force, or its accusatory tone—You don't see anything? You ought to see something."— The Collagist





Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women. Trans. by John Fletcher.
MacLehose Press, 2013.

Three women who almost had it all...

Norah thinks she has made it when she qualifies as a lawyer in Paris; Fanta works her way into a prestigious teaching job in her home city; Khady runs a cafe with her loving husband - now all she wants is a child.
But family ties, broken or reasserted, will force each woman to face a journey from France to Africa or from Africa to France that will take the future out of their hands and change their lives forever.
Domineering fathers, weak lovers, the perilous road of the refugee - they will need all their courage and inner strength if they are to overcome.
From Man Booker International Prize finalist, Marie NDiaye.

“Passionate and unsettling. . . . A major work of world literature. . . . NDiaye is a rare novelist, whose arrival in America is long overdue.” —NPR

“A masterpiece of narrative ingenuity and emotional extremes . . . the poised creation of a novelist unafraid to explore the extremes of human suffering. . . . A writer of the highest caliber . . . NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people’s lives.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Gorgeous, fearless prose . . . NDiaye’s storytelling approaches something of the power and simplicity of folklore. . . . There is good and evil here, and as in the world they are blended confusingly and only slowly revealed. In the interplay between Europe and Africa, between men and women, NDiaye finds both beauty and beast.” —Boston Globe

“Captivating and unsettling. . . . A multifaceted glimpse of lives too rarely seen in print. . . . With spare prose and evocative imagery . . . John Fletcher’s translation conveys the richness and precision of language for which NDiaye is renowned in the French-speaking world. . . . In each of the novel’s characters, strength and weakness, violence and vulnerability are as intertwined as the quotidian and the extraordinary in NDiaye’s storytelling.” —Ms.

“Hypnotic . . . Powerful . . . Compelling . . . [NDiaye] is an impressive stylist with a strong voice. . . . A novel that examines bravely and from both sides the collision of Europe and Africa.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“NDiaye’s quiet intelligence is made apparent by the complexity of her characters and her intuitive prose in this subtly beautiful novel.” —Publishers Weekly

“A tenuously linked tripartite novel that is more than the sum of its parts is a hard act to pull off. Marie NDiaye, one of France’s most exciting prose stylists and playwrights, succeeds with elegance, grit and some painful comedy in Three Strong Women. . . . Its three heroines have an unassailable sense of their own self-worth, while their psychological battles have an almost mythic resonance. . . . The prose compels with astonishing range and precision.” —The Guardian (UK)

“Compelling . . . NDiaye dissects her characters with impressive forensic detail, the subtlest speech inflection or gesture put under the microscope. . . . The language has an hypnotic emotional intensity . . . the novel has a passion, daring and individuality.”—The Independent (UK)

“Sinewy and sardonic, combining realism and fable in a way that mixes Kafka and Cinderella . . . Three Strong Women is full of NDiaye’s narrative gusto, stylistic virtuosity and command of tone. . . . The power the stories reveal is that of self-knowledge, self-belief and endurance.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“A beautiful novel . . . NDiaye’s writing is extraordinarily powerful, and she is very well served by John Fletcher’s elegant, economical translation.” —The Times (UK)

“The beauty of her language, the strange force of her inspiration, her mastery of narrative have established her as one of the important figures in French literature . . . [she] opens up the mysterious world of the most secret thoughts.” —Le Monde

“Here is the beauty of Marie NDiaye’s novel: a fire burning in the heart of a cold and frozen existence.” —Journal du Dimanche

“Between Africa and France, her enchanted heroines, cursed by history, cast their nets, and glowing with their hard-won freedom—strong women even taking off towards death.” —Le Figaro

“A sumptuous classicism . . . Proust and Faulkner conversing under African skies . . . one of our greatest writers.” —Le Point

“Mastery of form carried to extraordinary levels. . . . Velvety prose, wise and precise—a frighteningly just, real, dignified, and poignant vision of suffering humanity.” —Telerama

“A masterly work, served by an exacting, intense, and bewitching prose, implacably apt throughout, transporting us to the edge of the strange and the imaginary. Three Strong Women surely established Marie NDiaye as one of the most eminent 'writer-storytellers' of our time.” —Rentrée Littéraire 2009

“Sinuous long phrases, at times brutal, at times sweet, underline and follow the emerging consciousness of these African women in their quest for identity . . . Riveting, hypnotizing prose.”
—Marie Claire

“Strength. That is the word that would suffice to summarize the genius of this work . . . NDiaye’s new novel has the force of a fist.” —Evene