jordan stump – Three Percent

Five Questions with Jordan Stump

Chad Post — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 21:00:25 +0000

My plan for this short interview—along with the ones I have scheduled for the rest of the month—was to write about��by Scholastique Mukasonga and��by Marie NDiaye earlier in the week (along with a few other French books) as a way of providing a context for this interview.

I did end up writing something about the books, although it started with a lot of vitriol toward the Rochester Police Department, and included some things about myself that I don’t necessarily feel comfortable sharing in this space. I’m thinking that I’ll fix all the typos and post it on , which I rarely, ever use (but probably should?).

Anyway, if you’re a fan of these two books—or of Jordan Stump’s work as a whole—I think you’ll like this interview. And hopefully this week things will settle down enough to get back to posting more regularly again.

How did you come to Igifu��and/or��That Time of Year?

I’ve been delightedly reading and teaching NDiaye’s books since the early nineties; it took me a while to begin translating her (in part because my early attempts were so unworthy of her beautiful writing that I simply gave up). I ended up translating several of her later books, but my mind kept going back to her earlier work, which is undertranslated and vastly underrated in this country; I thought particularly of That Time of Year, which I read when it first came out, way back in 1994 or thereabouts. I was utterly thrilled when Two Lines agreed to let me bring it, at last, to the American reader.

Why should people read these books?

Because they’re beautiful, in two very different ways (“beauty” being defined rather broadly here). There are of course many other reasons, but for me that’s always the only one that really matters.

What did you learn in the process of translating these books? (Or, how did you grow as a translator by working on them?)

Not so much a matter of learning as of confirmation, I guess: the glorious power of endless revision. Both Igifu and That Time of Year eluded me a bit in my first drafts; in both cases, once again, I saw that the way through obstacles in translation is long, drawn-out, constant rethinking and reconsideration. The more I translate, the more I’m amazed at what a translation can do as long as it’s given enough time and enough thought to develop.

What specific elements of style/structure/voice were the most challenging/rewarding about these projects?

In both cases, I think the challenge is not running roughshod over the delicate balance of the text. Both NDiaye and Mukasonga have understated voices, though they’re not understated in the same way—the kind of voices that can be disfigured by an overly “poetic” translation, but that can easily turn flat if they’re rendered too plainly. Letting the voice come through as itself, not as something I can turn it into: that’s always the challenge of translation, and with writers whose voices I particularly love it’s particularly urgent to get it right.

If someone loved Igifu/That Time of Year, what would you��recommend they read next?

I don’t mean this to be a facile answer: these are both writers whose work grows richer the more you read of it—so read more NDiaye and more Mukasonga!

“The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Fri, 29 May 2020 18:52:31 +0000

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles .��

Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and Anvil, 2018) as well as numerous poems and essays in German and English. He is currently working on his first novel.

by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Knopf)��

Marie NDiaye’s gifts as a psychologically acute observer, a novelist with exceptional skill in depicting characters at an extraordinary depth and vividness have been well observed and described. The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel is one more in a row of widely acclaimed novels about all kinds of characters. This one is about a cook who rose from rags to riches, not without being profoundly uncomfortable about the whole affair. The descriptions of her tumult, her growth, of the way she came to become a cook, through an accident, the sumptuous descriptions of her delight in the art of cooking, of her shame of her upbringing, all of this is masterfully evoked. Except—we see it all indirectly. The Cheffe does not speak with us—we hear the voice of a seemingly devoted narrator who works with and admires her, a factotum, almost.

It is tempting to read this novel entirely as a biography of the titular cook. After all, NDiaye fills her novel with extraordinary elements. There is the sense of class—the shame of one’s roots, and the quiet, but conflicting pride in having elevated one’s craftsmanship to such a prominent level as the Cheffe has. Cooking is, like writing, a craft that best works with an audience: readers, eaters. And the moment of reading, eating, is central to the book’s most pivotal moments. She finds herself a cook because she works in the kitchen of a rich, strange family, and is suddenly afforded the opportunity to take over duties as head chef. So she, already dissatisfied with the previous cook’s work, works out her own dishes and impresses her employers, the strange Clapeau family. Another such moment presents itself when she cooks refined dishes for her parents, who do not like their daughter’s vaunted cooking skills. At this point, we know that “refined” doesn’t mean “pretentious” in the dismissive sense of the word. The Cheffe has genuinely elevated her craft—and her palette in a way that shifts her sense of place and class so much it creates a rupture with her origins. As Pierre Bourdieu noted about himself: a second habitus has developed, and a shift has taken place, which the Cheffe finds disturbing.

Without unnecessarily going into details, this is the rift that motivated the self-examination at the heart of some of Didier Eribon’s recent work, most famously the Return to Reims, and it is not overall uncommon in literature. What is different here is the way NDiaye presents her female protagonist at the levels of the process—she is the head chef, a position unusual enough and important enough for the book that Jordan Stump’s translation has preserved it as the book’s title. It is an unusual choice—the Grand Robert, the Merriam-Webster of the French language, recommends turning the customary “le chef” into “la chef”—but that is not an option here. What’s more, the mastery of cooking—and the concept of mastery per se—is still understood as inherently male. 77% of professional chefs in the US are male, while home cooks are majority female. The difference here is written into the title of the book and its protagonist. She is one of modern cooking’s auteur chefs—with specific, painstakingly created, unique signature dishes, and the kitchen doubling as a “room of her own.”

One has to admire the book’s style, well translated by Jordan Stump, of what could maybe be called exact sumptuousness—a style that perfectly conveys the seductiveness of cooking, the richness of flavors and scents, the attraction of each individual element that composes a great dish, without decomposing into faux-baroque mush, a danger in books about the senses. This skill is heightened by the fact that all this description is wrapped around the simpler, sometimes strangely whiny discursive language of the narrator, a former cook in the Cheffe’s restaurant, hopelessly infatuated with his boss, and still writing, from his elegant retirement home, with a gesture of longing and admiration. His language is halting, self-correcting, searching, and contra many reviews of the novel, it is this narrator that elevates NDiaye’s novel above many of its contemporaries.

NDiaye has long been suspicious of autofiction and autobiography. Not belonging to the community Léonora Miano’s Afropeans, or at least not overtly identifying with them, she has often described herself as French, her Senegalese roots not as central to her identity as her interlocutors and reviewers like to make them, at least, not explicitly. In her work, her heritage and background shines through in much of her best work—but how does it relate to the “Cheffe” at the center of the work? In what I think is her most underappreciated work, the Autoportrait en Vert, NDiaye offers a strange hallucinatory search for a self, an apparition. The book is a challenge to readers, a book at odds with some fashionable assessments of what autofictional literature can, and maybe should, do. It is literally an evasive book—a chase for a phantom.

In The Cheffe, Marie NDiaye writes about a woman who does not want to be defined by her biography, who does not want pictures taken of her face to overshadow the work she produces. The Cheffe wants her work to speak for itself, her dishes to be tasted without being seen as reflections of any specific person. This fact is so central to the book that the narrator begins by explaining it to us before pushing aside any such concerns, before digging up and uncovering the biography of someone who hated being so uncovered. His doubts and thoughts are constantly with us. It is a mistake to read Marie NDiaye’s novel as a psychological portrait of the cook alone or even primarily. It is a portrait of the act of biography, the epistemological violence of dragging an author into a spotlight not sought by them. It is by no means an accident that this factotum, this insistent biographer is male—and that he pushes himself to the front of the picture, so that we never see the Cheffe without also seeing him, and his woeful inner torment. In French literature, this ponderous male voice is common—for example, it is all over Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich and his two assassins. Not content to write the story of the assassination, Binet also writes the story of writing the story—including a discussion of other books being written about the topic and why his project is superior, more truthful, better.

It is difficult not to read The Cheffe as a novel not just about female ambition and success, not just about class and power, but a book about how interwoven our knowledge of the world is with the masculine push to dominate narrative. As in Autoportrait en Vert, here, too, Marie NDiaye offers us a chase—and a trap. The Cheffe’s psychology is given to us by the narrator, and the narrator alone. This is not about him being reliable or unreliable—it is about him being a central character of the story. Patriarchal constructions of narrative history as well as masculine dominance of literature mean that we must always be careful around these tales of female lives told to us by men. And where we must be most on our toes is about stories about female relationships with other women, in stories written by men. And so NDiaye includes a difficult relationship, between the Cheffe and her daughter, but makes sure we understand the extent to which this relationship is refracted through the eyes of the narrator.

And yet, despite all this metafictional finesse, this cleverness, this, even, bitterness of Marie NDiaye, a cheffe herself struggling with the narratives draped upon her shoulders, the book is never bogged down. Often, you have to choose—some of the clever books praised by reviewers and readers for their intelligence offer little in the way of story and characters, falling back on the bare bones of cleverness and conceit. This is not the case here. The book is never less than richly readable, engaging, a brilliant book by a great storyteller and a sharp thinker.

“Ladivine” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:00:00 +0000

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!

The entry below is by Trevor Berrett of He also moderates a dedicated to the BTBA. Feel free to join and post your opinions and rants and raves.

Ladivine”:http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/234541/ladivine-by-marie-ndiaye/ by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Knopf)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 85%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 17%

NDiaye’s books are illuminating while retaining so much mystery, or, rather, they are illuminating because they retain so much mystery. For example, the lines between characters often feel blurry to the point I sometimes don’t quite know who’s on the page anymore, and yet this confusion is the very moment I see light. NDiaye plays with this mixture of illumination and mystery particularly well in the seemingly straight-forward Ladivine, a worthy inclusion to this years Best Translated Book Award longlist, and, for my money, a worthy winner.

As the book begins, we meet a woman named Clarisse Rivière, but from the first sentence her identity is in flux:

She was Malinka again the moment she got on the train, and she found it neither a pleasure nor a burden, having long since stopped noticing.

When I first read this, I smiled and settled back in my chair, excited to again be in such capable hands. The next paragraph keeps the mystery alive, as we learn this is a woman who has somehow split her identity:

But it happened, she could tell, for no more could she answer without a second thought to “Clarisse” when, rarely, someone she knew took that same train and called to or greeted her as “Clarisse,” only to see her stare back in puzzled surprise, a hesitant smile on her lips, creating a mutual discomfort that the slightly flustered Clarisse never thought to dispel by simply echoing that “Hello,” that “How are you,” as offhandedly as she could.

Clarisse is on the train to Bordeaux, to visit her mother, as she does once every month, and we soon find out that her mother knows her as Malinka. Naturally; it was her mother who named her Malinka, and her mother has no idea of any other name. Clarisse has, but for these monthly ventures to a forsaken existence, completely repudiated her past and, with it, her mother. When she leaves Bordeaux, she sheds the skin of Malinka and finds no difficulty answering to Clarisse.

The book continues for some time to tell us about Clarisse by telling us about the people in her life: her mother, a black seamstress with no money, whom Clarisse refers to (and, thus, keeps distant) as “the servant”; her husband, who eventually leaves her, in part because Clarisse “couldn’t hold back the numbness gradually overtaking her household, the cold torpor exuded in spite of her by her artificial, oblique self”; and her daughter, whom she has named Ladivine, Ladivine being the name of her repudiated mother in Bordeaux and therefore a conscious tie to that past. Clarisse’s mother Ladivine knows nothing about her granddaughter Ladivine, though she suspects. After all, because visits from her daughter are so scarce she has watched her daughter with that much more attention. And she can fill in the blanks: those months when Malinka did not visit were because she was pregnant. Her mother loves her enough, perhaps even sympathizes with her motives to shun her, that she doesn’t rock the boat by asking questions. Which is not to suggest that NDiaye wants us to feel any of the same sympathy.

Throughout this section—it’s just the first—NDiaye manages a beautiful ambivalence, just as Clarisse manages her tragic ambivalence. Clarisse repudiates her past but she visits her mother every month, thereby retaining this past. We come to understand that she loves her mother; she’s just ashamed of “the servant.” Clarisse’s hope to become the person she envisions in her mind is felt on each page, though we also feel the melancholy of a half soul. Such nuance imbues the books with its mysterious power, though the story, as it explores the gulfs between people, gulfs they create while apparently seeking something, is fascinating as well.

This first section comes to a conclusion with surprising violence, and NDiaye destabilizes the entire narrative as our attention is directed primarily at Clarisse’s daughter Ladivine who begins to sense, without fully understanding, her mother’s hidden half. With Ladivine, we descend into a horrific labyrinth.

Making the labyrinth a psychological nightmare are all of the doubling and transformations throughout: obviously we have the two women named Ladivine, their disconnection/connection, and what all of that says about Clarisse, but we also have Clarisse’s husband Richard who, after he has abandoned her, marries another woman named Clarisse. The novel’s strangest bits suggest a transformation in to a protective dog. The transgression of these boundaries, though, are based in psychological realism, leading to the novel’s fascinating conclusion.

Why this Book Should Win – The Author and Me by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer

Monica Carter — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 11:00:44 +0000

Michael Orthofer runs the – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its weblog.

– Éric Chevillard, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, France
Dalkey Archive Press

Obviously, two-time, back-to-back winner László Krasznahorkai has made the biggest splash at the Best Translated Book Award in recent years, but several other authors have also proven to be more than one-hit wonders. So, for example, former winner (2011, for ) Tove Jansson features on this year’s longlist, as do shortlisted authors from recent years such as Elena Ferrante (2014), Edouard Levé (2013), and Jean Echenoz (2012). One more name that keeps cropping up is that of Éric Chevillard: his was longlisted in 2012, and a year later was shortlisted. So is 2015 the year Chevillard goes all the way, on the back of Jordan Stump‘s translation of his novel, ?

A book-length rant by a character who is served cauliflower gratin rather than the trout amandine he was expecting – okay, perhaps it doesn’t sound like the most promising material. And yet … what more could one ask for?

Sure, the author admits, in a footnote well into the book, that maybe he’s taking things a bit far:

(R)eally, a whole book against cauliflower gratin, what a ridiculous conceit, it’s not credible, not for a second

He suggests, too:

No, the reader will surely prefer to see all this as an allegory, and will struggle to decipher it: that cauliflower gratin can only be a metaphor for the good old-fashioned novel still stewing in the kitchens of our literature.

Certainly, one can – and probably does well to – read this and more into the protagonist’s arguments. But as in any good allegory, The Author and Me (and the cauliflower/trout debate) functions well on multiple levels: regardless of how deep or shallow the meaning, this is some fine raging on offer here.

Yet there’s more to The Author and Me, too: as the title suggests, this is a novel that also plays some games with questions of the relationship between author and subject. In his Foreword, Chevillard insists he’s out to prove his autonomy-as-author – to show that he’s the one in charge and differentiate himself from a protagonist who, he insists, isn’t just a mouthpiece-cum-alter ego. Just to make things clear, he intrudes in the story-proper – in footnotes explaining his position. Wanting to assert autonomy, and authorial authority – and to show he’s the better man (“The author’s mind is more spirited, bolder, and even more sensitive”, he claims, for example, just to be clear …) – he struggles to differentiate himself from his character. Eventually, he feels he has to put his foot(note) down more firmly, asserting himself in a secondary story (suggested title: My Ant) – a forty-page excursion (all in that single footnote) following … an ant. (No worries, the cauliflower gratin/trout amandine mix-up hasn’t been forgotten: it crops up here as well.)

Oh, and for those who prefer their novels with a bit of a more conventional arc of drama and suspense, The Author and Me also offers … murder! (Some readers may, indeed, wonder, as the narrator rants and rants endlessly along, at what point the Mademoiselle who is his silent, long-suffering audience reaches the breaking point and reaches across the table to start throttling him – or perhaps suspect Chevillard-as-author will assert final authority by doing in his wordy creation himself … but Chevillard follows convention only so far (not very; not very, at all) so there’s some surprise here, too. (Indeed, as he hopefully notes in his final footnote: “He trusts that this twist will leave his reader agape, and, why not, stammering �³�…w��…”.)

The Author and Me is a fairly slim (146-page) albeit occasionally dense (certainly literally so, in that footnote-story-section, some forty pages of fine print …) novel that builds a tour de force on its simple premises – cauliflower vs. trout; author vs. protagonist. Chevillard has considerable fun while he’s at it – and so then does the reader – and shows incredible dexterity in what he does with his story. It’s challenging – in no small part because Chevillard refuses to give in to convention(s) – to put up with cauliflower gratin! – but rewardingly so.

has been engaged with Éric Chevillard’s writing for many years: the first of Chevillard’s books he translated was , in 1997; The Author and Me is the fourth. With its stylistic range and playfulness, Chevillard’s writing, more than most, is surely not something either translator or reader can easily get comfortable with – a 1997 reviewThe Crab Nebula, in The New York Times Book Review by Liam Callanan noting:

“‘Translation is entirely mysterious,’ Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked, and so is Eric Chevillard’s brief novel — his first to be translated into English. The mystery stems not from any conflict between the English text (by Jordan Stump and Eleanor Hardin) and the original French, but more from the translation from thought to page.”

The translation-challenges posed by The Author and Me are different, but no less demanding, and Stump has captured Chevillard’s tone and registers (and the humor to it all) expertly.

Multilayered, though-provoking – and very funny – The Author and Me is a rich work, indeed deserving of serious consideration for Best Translated Book Award honors.

Self-Portrait in Green

Kaija Straumanis — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:00:00 +0000

Marie NDiaye has created a tiny, psychological masterpiece with her Self-Portrait in Green. In it she explores how our private fears and insecurities can distort what we believe to be real and can cause us to sabotage our intimate relationships. In particular, NDiaye conveys a powerful message about the unconscious vulnerabilities that cause women to undermine healthy relationships with each other, and in doing so she solidifies her place as a unique voice in feminist literature.

The story’s unnamed narrator, a female French novelist of West African heritage, is based on Marie NDiaye. “Marie” perceives that certain females in her life are “women in green”—disorienting, elusive, unpredictable, and destructive. Among these are her mother, her former schoolteacher, and certain friends and acquaintances. Sometimes the women are, literally, green—they wear green clothes, hide behind trees or have green eyes. With others, the visual association is unnecessary—they are “green” simply because of the negative feelings that they evoke in Marie.

Marie’s voice is wonderfully unsettling and original. Her disturbed state of mind is apparent from the very first pages. Her anxieties override rational thought and, in this confused state of mind, the women in her life bear the brunt of her insecurities. NDiaye’s use of the color green as an instrument to visualize Marie’s vilification of women is smart and effective. She relates how the tendency to demonize other women erodes Marie’s own self-worth and cripples her other relationships, namely with her father and siblings.

Marie is the most unreliable of narrators, and NDiaye employs her own brand of magic realism to describe Marie’s reality, a style that she also uses in the first novella of her later book, Three Strong Women. In both works the female protagonists exist in hyper-sensory states, and their heightened senses create emotional reflexes that, without exception, are negative and cause harm. Both novellas also demonstrate NDiaye’s clever use of symbolism, which provides additional dimension and depth to her prose.

In the final pages of the book Marie becomes convinced that it is her destiny to become a woman in green—the personification of her fears and insecurities. She succumbs to the inertia of remaining in the destructive cycle that her mind has created, incapable of the necessary self-reflection to acknowledge that the evil that she sees in others is merely a misapplication of her own weaknesses.

Latest Review: "Self-Portrait in Green" by Marie NDiaye

Kaija Straumanis — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:00:00 +0000

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green, translated by Jordan Stump, and out from Two Lines Press.

Lori is an attorney who lives in Dallas, Texas, and is a member of the Board of Deep Vellum Publishing in Dallas.

Hope everyone is having a great start to 2015. We sure are! Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review:

Marie NDiaye has created a tiny, psychological masterpiece with her Self-Portrait in Green. In it she explores how our private fears and insecurities can distort what we believe to be real and can cause us to sabotage our intimate relationships. In particular, NDiaye conveys a powerful message about the unconscious vulnerabilities that cause women to undermine healthy relationships with each other, and in doing so she solidifies her place as a unique voice in feminist literature.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Dear Publisher, I Love You by Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 13:33:41 +0000

Monica Carter is a freelance critic.

This week as I takeover the BTBA blog and I finally get the opportunity to do something I have been longing to do – highlight some of the incredible publishers the are committed to producing quality literature in translation. Each day, I will tip my hat to a small press that has grown with the Best Translated Book Award, which began in 2007. There are no specific requirements except that these publishers continued to refine their identities, remain loyal to their mission statements and produce great works each year for Americans to discover, read and discuss.

Since the alphabet begins with “A” and I have never been shy about my love for them, I will begin with . Run by the elegant Jill Schoolman and a small staff, Archipelago is celebrating its tenth year in publishing this October. I could explain exactly what they are about, but they say it best in this excerpt:

Archipelago Books is a not-for-profit press devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature. In our first decade, we have brought out over ninety books from more than twenty-five languages.

Artistic exchange between cultures is a crucial aspect of global understanding. It has never been more important for voices from around the world to be heard in this country—our place in the world depends upon it. Sadly, less than three percent of new literature published in the United States originates outside the Anglosphere. By publishing diverse and innovative literary translations we are doing what we can to change this lamentable circumstance and to broaden the American literary landscape.

We are always striving to find literary voices that simply would never be heard in the U.S. without Archipelago. While our efforts, especially those of our translators and authors, have been recognized by numerous literary awards, the sort of recognition we seek is for those largely unknown and forgotten locales—the Spanish Basque Country, the Chukchi lands of Siberia, the scrublands of South Africa, war-torn Lebanon—and the writing that allows our readers to see these places through the eyes of the people who live there.

Not that I don’t think the above sentiment is lovely, but the reason I fell in love with Archipelago was a little reddish-orange covered number entitled, , by Dominique Fabre, translated by Jordan Stump. A slim, whisper of a book that speaks to aging, solitude and the need for human contact, it feels like a philosophy primer for the meaning of life. A short read with a long tail impact.

Any book after that I spied with the tiny cluster of islands on the spine went immediately into my hands. I was obsessed.

Then came by Ernst Weiss, translated by Joel Rotenberg. A compelling, creepy read about a murderer who still wants to use his talents to contribute to humanity (check my review . My site is under construction, by the way) in this original tale of a man’s own struggle between good and evil.

Seeming able to choose classics and contemporary fiction and poetry with equal expertise, Archipelago steadily built a long list of premiere literature in translation from well-chosen locations that represented lands and peoples with deep traditions not known outside of that area. Along the way, Achipelago picked up numerous prizes and garnered more attention from the media. Then they virtually hit gold. This gold, otherwise known as the “Norwegian Marcel Proust”, is Karl Ove Knausgaard. I don’t know whether or not Archipelago had the foresight of Knausgaard’s success because the fact is they would have picked up Knausgaard for the quality anyway. What sets Archipelago apart from most publishers is not only their impeccable taste, their faith in their writers and their translators, but it is this magical element – they have faith in readers out there, in you and me. I don’t know about you but I feel underestimated by most American media, including publishers, and I appreciate that someone doesn’t assume I will run screaming from the bookstore because a book is over 300 pages.

Archipelago Books, this love letter is to you. You have made my life better through reading, through your sophistication and through your loyalty. You’ve even made my bookshelves prettier. Don’t go changing, I love you just they way you are.

All My Friends

Kaija Straumanis — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 15:00:00 +0000

For my first review for Open Letter Books, I was delighted to discover in my letterbox in the French Pyrenees a copy of Marie NDiaye’s All My Friends. Tearing open the package, I savored the look and feel of the jacket covers, as is my habit prior to dipping into a book. It was smooth, rich and velvety to the touch, black as darkness on the front, and milky brown as my favorite galaxy chocolate bar on the back, deep, luscious colors connected by the electric blue of the spine.

I delighted in rolling the sound of the author’s surname on my tongue—two syllables or perhaps three, a name as exotic sounding as the translator’s definitive single syllable is business-like. His name on the cover already a pleasant surprise for a British reader accustomed to the translator’s invisibility, hidden away as he or she normally is in small font on an inside page.

And then there was the suitcase on the front cover—brown leather, battered and worn, disappearing into the black inkiness to who knows where. The back cover, a close-up of the tacks holding it together. Memories of a half a dozen or so such cases in my grandparents’ loft touched a profound emotional chord. I liked the book already, there are friends in the title and we are going on a journey or journeys with a suitcase—if there were but that in life, it would be plenty.

A final exterior tour before settling into the first story. The back cover blurb leaps out at me with the assertion that this is “NDiaye’s lacerating look at the personal trials we fight every day to suppress” and the New York Times Book Review on the inside cover flap boldly claims that NDiaye is a storyteller “with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people’s lives.” Intriguing . . . will I, inside these pages, find my personal trials or rock-bottom realities mirrored? Let’s see . . .

All My Friends consists of five stories in a slim, 140-page volume whose length belies its complexity. Of course, short stories cannot be summed up in a single sentence, but just to give an idea of what they contain, whilst leaving them to reveal their own surprises to future readers, here are five one-line summaries:

The title story “All My Friends” is about a separated former school teacher who amorously pursues an ex-pupil; “The Death of Claude François” charts an encounter between two childhood friends that reveals very contrasting lives thirty years later; “The Boys” portrays two youngsters whose sacrifice rescues their families from hunger and hardship; “Brulard’s Day,” the longest story, follows a fading, second-rate actress as she loses her self-esteem. In the final story, “Revelation,” just six pages long, a mother and son go on a bus journey from which only the mother will return.

The deliciously mouth-watering opening sentence immediately gets to work: “The next time I see Werner, once this is all over, a nervous snicker will be his only greeting. He’ll back a few steps away, cautious and for once, unsure of himself.”

NDiaye opens the suitcase and displays her consummate short-storytelling skills: a flash forward, the mysterious Werner who doesn’t appear again until eight pages later and whose identity is not revealed for another fifteen, a first-person narrator whose gender remains murky for seven long pages, and plenty more questions besides. NDiaye skillfully and elliptically draws us in. As a British reader, I linger on the unfamiliar American “snicker,” not sure of its exact intent (mocking, ironic, dry, embarrassed . . . ?) and also because it seems to tilt me into an American context rather than the expected French one.

Yet the snicker jogs me into wondering—is place important in NDiaye’s stories? Some characters’ names are French, others could cross borders unnoticed. Settings are generally in France or the Francosphere, but the further the reader penetrates the stories, the more the themes and motifs become insistently human rather than culture-specific.

The thread running through the work is the broken, defective connections between people themselves and between individuals’ inner desires and outer reality. These connections are like dots that, no matter how hard you try, are impossible to join up to make a coherent picture.

The protagonist in All My Friends, abandoned by his spouse and the victim of unrequited love, slides into an insanity that feeds his belief that even his house opposes him, as he speaks of “the disquiet that my house’s whispering depths inspire in me every night (for my house doesn’t like me).” His house machinates against him while Werner, more in control of his life, has “the house of a flourishing adult.” In “Brulard’s Day,” ageing actress Eve is tormented by the invisible presence of her youthful self and is caught in an unstoppable decline embodied by her “brown tasseled loafers. That she’d been reduced to wearing such shoes tormented and astonished her at the same time.”

Other stories juxtapose wealth with poverty, choice with lack of choice and are peopled with characters who orbit one another in utterly different realities. In “The Boys,” “feeble, scrawny and misshapen” René, who blends in with the “shabby chiaroscuro of the far end of the room,” looks on enviously as his handsome young neighbor Anthony is sold to a rich city woman to rescue Anthony’s mother from hardship. Yet René’s fervent wish “Let me be bought, bought, bought” gets him something very different from what he anticipated.

Similarly, the characters in “The Death of Claude François” pay high prices to achieve their desires: to engender her ideal child, Zaka had “coupled with a white elephant, and that generous but slow-witted animal wouldn’t give up on the idea that it was her equal.” Desire and reality—like the stories themselves—slip in and out of reach.
“Revelation,” the final story, is a perfect distillation of all NDiaye’s themes—the opposition between inner and outer worlds, between self and the other, and the missed connections that do indeed mirror our personal trials, as the blurb suggested. Struggles that are never more clearly explored than in the mind of the mother willfully abandoning her damaged child: “She’d be coming home alone, thank God: how she would miss him!”

All My Friends is not an easy read; short stories by their nature are laconic and elliptical, and NDiaye courageously constructs plots and writes of issues that are inherently, almost overly, complex. The reader is required to engage his or her own imagination and interpretation—but is richly rewarded for the effort.

Latest Review: "All My Friends" by Marie NDiaye

Kaija Straumanis — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 15:00:00 +0000

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Andrea Reece on Marie NDiaye’s All My Friends, translated by Jordan Stump and out from Two Lines Press.

Andrea has worked as a professional translator for many years and recently completed an MA in literary translation at the University of Exeter. Here’s a part of her review:

All My Friends consists of five stories in a slim, 140-page volume whose length belies its complexity. Of course, short stories cannot be summed up in a single sentence, but just to give an idea of what they contain, whilst leaving them to reveal their own surprises to future readers, here are five one-line summaries:

The title story “All My Friends” is about a separated former school teacher who amorously pursues an ex-pupil; “The Death of Claude François” charts an encounter between two childhood friends that reveals very contrasting lives thirty years later; “The Boys” portrays two youngsters whose sacrifice rescues their families from hunger and hardship; “Brulard’s Day,” the longest story, follows a fading, second-rate actress as she loses her self-esteem. In the final story, “Revelation,” just six pages long, a mother and son go on a bus journey from which only the mother will return.

The deliciously mouth-watering opening sentence immediately gets to work: “The next time I see Werner, once this is all over, a nervous snicker will be his only greeting. He’ll back a few steps away, cautious and for once, unsure of himself.”

For the rest of the review, go here.

We Monks & Soldiers

Chad Post — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Lutz Bassman’s We Monks & Soldiers is a post-exoticist collection of several interrelated stories set during the final shallow breaths of humanity. An exorcism is performed that may or may not have resulted in the slaughter of an innocent family. An agent carries out a strange mission with varying levels of success. A vast prison is detailed. Two monks make their way into a new proletarian universe and are killed almost instantly by an oppressive military institution. A race of bird-people are cruelly tended to in their dying days inside a compound in the woods. 

The point of all of these vignettes is to show a world of apocalypse―the end has come and it is time to make way for the spiders. Perhaps more importantly than future spider-people and dream quests is the critique of modern neo-liberal capitalism, and the dangers of any group, be it governments or corporations, owning our souls. In fits and starts, a picture is painted for us: the Communist Global Revolution foretold since Marx has finally come about, but it was quickly co-opted and compromised by businesses, and the people were left off worse than before. There is one very important, easy to miss line of description in the section “Crisis at the Tong Fong Hotel” that provides ample implied evidence for the history of this damaged world:

[The man] was endowed with an enormous chignon. Atop it he wore a black cap with a drooping, damaged visor and, on one side, an embroidered reproduction of a Coca-Cola calligraph in Chinese.

Other parts of the book mention that some sort of absolutely devastating war happened, most likely with the use of nuclear weapons, involving America, and now the only safe spots left to live are on the coast as the last generation of humanity waits to die. Something important to mention is that Lutz Bassmann is not a real person; the actual author is Antoine Volodine. Bassmann is merely one of his merely synonyms. It is also important to note that according to another text of Volodine’s, Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, Lutz Bassmann is incarcerated in a high-security prison for his literary crimes, along with every other author involved in the post-exoticist movement. Considering the chapter in We Monks & Soldiers entitled “The Dive,” it would seem that Bassmann penned this novel while behind bars, awaiting his dismal end. 

Bassmann (Volodine) has a bit of an obsession with odors, especially unpleasant ones. The adjective ‘urinous’ is used multiple times, and bad smells are always wafting up from somewhere, from street vendors frying dough, from people packed together on a long train ride, from dead birds. My best guess is that the focus is twofold: the first is that smell possesses a powerful link to memory, but it is often our most-forgotten sense. Secondly, Volodine illustrates a cornucopia of bad smells as a way of showing what humanity really is, beyond the glossy portrayal of irreality bestowed upon the populace by corporate advertising (one might recall Nietzsche’s constant allusions to “bad air” in Beyond Good & Evil). 

Volodine certainly puts forth post-exoticist theory in We Monks & Soldiers. One such concept explored (although not explicitly stated) is that of the shaggå. In Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, Volodine describes the shaggå as a short story told seven times, each one somewhat modified, with no clear indication of what the truth of the matter actually is. This undertaking can be seen in the repetition (although, thankfully, only twice instead of sevenfold) of “Crisis at the Tong Fong Hotel,” wherein events unfold differently in both iterations of the story. It is definitely an intriguing concept, and casts doubt on what is real and what is fiction (as all good post-exoticist literature does), and the reader must decide for him- or herself what to take away from the text. 

All in all, We Monks & Soldiers is not a book for everyone. There is no happy ending, and the writing becomes a Gordian knot in some places. It is a mystery without an easy solution (if one ever existed in the first place). I am sure that there will be plenty who will complain of the book being too dense, too pretentious, too mired in overt communist propaganda (though that last charge can easily be dismissed by the text’s overall pervasive political nihilism). However, it is continuously entertaining despite its gloomy atmosphere, and is an excellent read for the cheerfully suicidal. One final note to add is that Jordan Stump’s English translation is markedly brilliant. One can really feel his channeling of Volodine here, like some wild oneiric shaman by the sea. Overall I found this book to be thoroughly enjoyable, from the gray pastiche of New Yagayane to the live immolation of two teenage girls on a train platform.

 �Ĩ{Silence after the review.}