#mariendiaye

[unabridgedbookstore]

August is Women in Translation Month! Join us this evening at 7PM to raise a glass in celebration of the Prix Goncourt-winning novelist & playwright Marie NDiaye with her English translator, Jordan Stump, and literary translator Jennifer Solheim. 🙌 • These are just a few of our favorite titles by women in translation. What are yours? #translatedtuesday #witmonth #mariendiaye (at Unabridged Bookstore)

[mollat-bordeaux]

#idéecadeaunoël2021mollat Collector @editionsfolio Marie NDiaye, Trois femmes puissantes #mariendiaye #litterature #femme #femmes #livre #book #librairie #mollat #bordeaux (à librairie mollat) https://www.instagram.com/p/CXTr6FSqmKY/?utm_medium=tumblr

[street-lamps-of-mars]

I never thought Marie Ndiaye could write something with soft edges but here it is. One of the best writers of our time. In her hands nothing is ineffable.  

(The plot in Ndiaye’s novels is incidental to the psychological expose of the characters so knowing a thing or two about it won’t compromise your thorough enjoyment of this book, but beware that some of the quotes below might be deemed to contain spoilers.)

p.16. “The clear, silvery, majestic light of that November morning so precise set off the Cheffe’s head, her hair pulled back and imprisoned in a pitiless chignon on her nape, her long, straight neck, smooth and solid as a young beech trunk, that for a moment I thought it wasn’t the Cheffe there beside me on the passenger seat but only her image, two-dimensional, without flesh or life, but nonetheless captivating, grand, and aloof, as she often appeared in my dreams, or as I saw her, felt her beside me when I found myself in my room after work, alone but because of that never truly alone.”

p.24. “But I still say she couldn’t bear the lack of friendship or admiration for her parents, she couldn’t accept that the few times they’d consented to come to the school for a meeting their exceptional, flamboyant personalities didn’t immediately snuff out all the harsh words the teacher was planning to say to them, that he did say to them, as if they were bad parents, neglectful, crude, greedy, blind to their child’s capacities, or maybe simply indifferent. And to make matters worse they never answered, they left in the same cheerful mood as when they came, having done their duty, docile but impenetrable, bucking the school as they bucked all institutions, yes, submissive on the surface because they were fundamentally easy going people but deep down immovable and obdurate and not even aware of it, like two little donkeys wrapped up in their own mysterious world.”

p.65. “That’s where it all came from, from that blinding white sunlight on the highway outside the rust-red cover of the pines, it came from the heat and the sight of nonexistent but undeniable rippling water on the packed earth of the Joda’s farmyard that summer when the spirit of cooking recognized the Cheffe and the Clapeaus saw it in her and on her, never in them, but they could still see it, that’s where it all came from: the morose winter sun would never have brought her out, The Cheffe always told herself, she would have gone on being invisible, unknown even to herself, untouched by anything, had the summer light of her sixteenth year not been there to reveal the thing in her that could have stayed veiled forever.”

p.75. “And that was something the Cheffe discovered in that little kitchen in the Landes, she discovered her own body, which until then she’d used only as a single thing, like a reliable machine she controlled from her heart: now, moved and joyous, she realized her body was made up of many little animals who’d learned to work flawlessly all on their own, and who, that afternoon, happy, modest, at once obedient and quietly enterprising, showed her all their savoir faire, working as a tight-knit team that in a sense excluded the Cheffe for her own good, working with an efficiency the Cheffe could never have achieved had she gone on trying to control the machine that until then she’d thought her body was.”

p.73. “I could never put the people I was cooking for out of my mind, I always feared they might not be happy, I always tried to tailor my work to what I assumed were their tastes and desires, that’s why I’ve always been average, virtuous but anxious, that’s why I’ve never reigned over anything, nor that it ever brought me serenity, I’ve never been free of mundane cares, I’ve never known peace, never known the calm cold exultation of perfect aloneness in the act of creation.”

p.81. “Now and then, in the lull at the end of the shift, she would express her surprise at something a customer or an employee had done, and we’d laugh and tell her we were surprised at her surprise, we all thought it blindingly obvious that such a person could only do such things, and she would gently shake her head, murmuring, ‘That’s not how it seemed to me at all.’ Then, in a joking tone that was only camouflage for her dismay at finding us young folk so jaded, she would say something like, ‘How could you possibly have seen that? You’d have to be just as debased as he is!’ And we all laughed, and she laughed along with us, we were so happy we’d amused her (we thought we were amusing her), and even happier that we’d taught her something about life, that for a moment we’d had that small superiority over her, who knew nothing of the world outside her kitchen, we thought, just as we thought knowing the world meant never letting yourself be taken in, doubting plain kindness, mistrusting an honest face.”

P.93. “When you first tasted the Cheffe’s cooking and, if you knew nothing about it, assumed that some luscious reward would crown the private efforts you’d put into appreciating each dish as its full, very demanding measure, you might have seen what played the part of the dessert as a discreet test of your merit, and almost your soul, because then, in order to find the delight you were looking for, you’d have to stifle your childish desire for the gratification of something sweet, but you did most certainly delight, if you could find it in yourself to be bold and curious, and as you delighted you felt you’d been elevated, taken seriously, and as you pushed back your chair you sent the Cheffe this thought that would long make of you, in your happiness, her debtor: you brought out the best in me.

Yes, you delighted, and strangely that delight demanded an investment of seriousness and resolve, in return for which you would never forget a moment of the experience. And if you then went back to more obliging desserts, I believe you had to feel something crumbling inside you, a backsliding not into some weakness or eccentricity but into everything that’s more trivial about you, and in time, to be sure, that would fade, with your busy life and its everyday ways, but I like to think a regret would still smolder inside you, flaming up whenever you realized you’d shown a lack of boldness or style, the regret was there and you couldn’t remember where it came from or what it was trying to tell you, no more than you can remember the distant cause of certain sadness that sometimes came over you, on seeing a golden light against a little patch of wall or the glistening chrome of a radiator grille on a dull summer day, the regret was there, the regret that you’d lacked the ability or desire to stay on the exceptional plane that, for the duration of a meal, the Cheffe had raised you to by the spirit of her cooking.”

p.157. “When I asked why she didn’t simply go back to the Clapeaus’ she said nothing for some time, not because she didn’t know how to answer but because she was trying to find the words, I could see her attention turn away from my face and descent into herself cautiously, as if it was afraid it might startle the truth that was hiding there, still loath to be flushed out. Finally she looked back toward me, gave me a strange, insistent stare (and as I shivered with fatigue in the just-cleaned kitchen I found myself wishing, absurdly, that I could lose consciousness and so escape the tyranny of her gaze, and so run no risk of disappointing her with a yawn or a shocked look, she who so rarely felt the need for sleep, and never the desire) and told me the sacrifice she’d resigned herself to when she left the child with her parents obliged her to undertake something far more ambitious than a return to the Clapeaus’ kitchen, she told me her only hope of enduring what she saw as a desertion, however temporary, and the thought of the child’s unhappiness, even if that too was short-lived, was to risk her own security, her own comfort, because it would have been unthinkable that the only price she had to pay for abandoning her child was running to the shelter of the Clapeaus’.”

p.215. “I was nineteen when I started as an apprentice at La Bonne Heure, fresh out of trade school, with a diploma the Cheffe didn’t even glance at when, one springtime mid afternoon, she met me in the dining room, sat me down facing her, and asked me a few standard questions in a voice at once clear and commanding, and soft, regularly running a slow, tranquil hand over her glistening hair, so flattened down and pulled back toward the little chignon that it almost seemed she was stroking her bare, polished skull, I’d never seen such a face, a face that to my eyes, as I felt but couldn’t yet put into words, seemed the archetype of all human faces, unmarked by sex, age, or beauty, I thought that face painfully perfect, and as I held my own face toward it, a face so muddled by timid youth, by uncertainty and ignorance, I feared I could never live up to the moral rigor that must very naturally belong to someone whose dignity had given her such an incarnation – a face impossible to weigh on any common scale or judge by any ordinary standard.”

p.232. “Yes, those were the years when La Bonne Heure became a haunt for all Bordeaux’s VIPs. There was no question it was happening, but the Cheffe was slow to face it, not because she had some grudge against the upper classes (she never forgot what she owed the Clapeaus), but because she didn’t want to see that even if she didn’t take reservations and kept her prices within reach of any budget the chic, well-heeled crowd was driving away everyone who wasn’t like them, not that they wanted that or dreamt it was happening, but simply by the inertial force of their authority, of their innate right, of everything that was exclusive and closed about them, everything cliquish and disdainful, the Cheffe knew it, yes, but she was slow to face it.”

[sourisgoguette]

La sorcière - Marie Ndiaye C'était mon premier Marie Ndiaye et j'ai été un peu déçue. Il m'avait été vivement recommandé par une personne qui m'est chère et j'aurais aimé aimer ce qu'elle aime, mais... Non. Hélas, cela tombait à plat. Pourtant, je pense que ce personnage de sorcière moderne se débattant entre ce qu'elle voudrait et l'apathie et la vilennie quelconque du monde aurait pu me plaire. C'est peut-être une rencontre manquée. #instabook #instalivre #bookstagram #lasorciere #mariendiaye #livrestagram #cequejelis #iveread #lectureencours #lecture #livre #roman #litterature #litteraturefrancaise #romancontemporain https://www.instagram.com/p/BugH38cnI2l/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1tmbjme014kuo

[llamas-on-the-beach]

@Regranned from @joburgreview - 'My Heart Hemmed In is a novel about racism which never once mentions the word. But that is characteristic of the subtlety that makes NDiaye such a clever and beloved writer. No garden-variety racist calls themselves a racist, after all. The whole of My Heart Hemmed In is needled with micro-aggressions that keep Nadia questioning whether events are really happening or not. ' I review Marie NDiaye’s newly translated masterpiece, a mixture of literary fiction, psychological thriller and absurdism. Link in bio. #books #book #lovereading #reading #read #bookstagram #africanliterature #africa #joburgreview #thejrb #bookreviews #newbooks #racism #absurdism #thriller #literaryfiction #frenchliterature #francophonie - #regrann #mariendiaye #womenwriters

[unabridgedbookstore]

✨ TONIGHT at 7PM ✨ In celebration of Women in Translation month, please join us for a discussion of Marie NDiaye's claustrophobic masterpiece, MY HEART HEMMED IN, with translator Jordan Stump and fellow translator Jennifer Solheim. #witmonth #translatedtuesday #mariendiaye #myhearthemmedin #twolinespress (at Unabridged Bookstore)

[unabridgedbookstore]

Happiest pub day to Marie NDiaye's extraordinary MY HEART HEMMED IN! We're thrilled to welcome the book's translator, Jordan Stump, to the shop on Tuesday, August 8th to discuss the work with fellow translator Jennifer Solheim. Join us! • "My Heart Hemmed In is extraordinary: an original and suspenseful novel that exposes all that is monstrous and ugly in the way that we regard those around us—our tendency to harbor suspicions, judgments and prejudices against people we do not want or even try, to understand. NDiaye takes us inside the disturbing mind of Nadia, her unforgettable protagonist, with writing that is arresting; the tension, immediately palpable, builds steadily. The temptation to turn the pages quickly is great but the prose is so fine that you will want to savor it. With its unsettling atmosphere reminiscent of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, NDiaye’s brilliant novel obtains pride of place with the very best literary horror. My Heart Hemmed In is a morality tale for our times.” — Lori Feathers, Interabang Books • #translatedtuesday #mariendiaye #myhearthemmedin (at Unabridged Bookstore)

[unabridgedbookstore]

This week's #translatedtuesday selection is Marie Ndiaye's lush, fearless SELF-PORTRAIT IN GREEN: "Because it was in front of her house that I saw her each day, for a long time I couldn't distinguish that green presence from her surroundings." Translated from the French by Jordan Stump. 🇫🇷 #mariendiaye #twolinespress (at Unabridged Bookstore)