Marie Ndiaye

"After his wife and child disappear at the end of their vacation in a small French village, Herman sets out to find them, only to find that his urgent inquiry immediately recedes into the background and he wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by its strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, hospitality that verges on mania, and a nightmarish act of collective forgetting"--

That Time of Year

Marie NDiaye has long been celebrated for her unrivaled ability to make us see just how little we understand about ourselves. My Heart Hemmed In is her most powerful statement on the hidden selves that we rarely glimpse-and are often shocked by.There is something very wrong with Nadia and her husband Ange, middle-aged provincial schoolteachers who slowly realize that they are despised by everyone around them. One day a savage wound appears in Ange's stomach, and as Nadia fights to save her husband's life their hideous neighbor Noget-a man everyone insists is a famous author-inexplicably imposes his care upon them. While Noget fattens them with ever richer foods, Nadia embarks on a nightmarish visit to her ex-husband and estranged son-is she abandoning Ange or revisiting old grievances in an attempt to save him?Conjuring an atmosphere of paranoia and menace, My Heart Hemmed In creates a bizarre, foggy world where strange coincidences, harsh cruelty, and constantly shifting relationships all seem part of some shadowy truth. Surreal, allegorical, and psychologically acute, My Heart Hemmed In shows a masterful author giving her readers her most complex and compelling world yet.

My Heart Hemmed in

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. This 10th anniversary hardcover edition of Marie NDiaye's genre-defying classic restores photographs that appeared in the original French edition alongside Jordan Stump's dazzling translation, revealing in English, at last, the complete vision of NDiaye's influential masterpiece.

10th Anniversary Edition

Self-Portrait in Green

In a small French town, a mediocre witch trapped in a cruel marriage cries watery tears of blood as she passes on her gifts to her twin daughters. They must soon make a choice: stay close to the nest and the mother who nourished them, or soar away form the dead-end claustrophobia their selfish father has imposed?

La sorcière

The Witch

théâtre

Les grandes personnes

A nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, the latest from the world-renowned, Prix Goncourt-winning French novelist unveils a small community characterized by absurd kindness, labyrinthine bureaucracy, strange customs, missing persons, and ghostly apparitions.

2009 tilldelades hon Goncourtpriset för sin roman Tre starka kvinnor. Nu är Marie NDiaye till baka med en sorgesång om svek och skuld. En mormor och hennes barnbarn. De bär samma förnamn men har aldrig träffats, de känner inte till varandras existens. Mellan dem står Malinka. En gång i månaden be söker hon i största hemlighet sin mor Ladivine. Hon berättar inget om sitt liv för henne, inte att hon bytt namn till Clarisse, att hon är gift eller att hon har en dotter som också döpts till Ladivine. Ladivine är en feberlik saga om att svika sitt ursprung och hur det förgiftar, förmörkar och förgör.

Marie Ndiaye

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