It has been said that NDiaye’s work is impossible to decode at the level of either psychology or conventional narrative. Certainly the phantasmagoric atmosphere she creates — diffuse realities and uncertain identities, fractured causality and impossible chronology, a constant movement of regression — suggests that her inspiration lies not in the real world but in nightmares or, more specifically, in the Freudian unconscious. In this view, Ladivine is the record of a trauma suffered by the woman who first left that tropical country, a trauma severe enough to haunt succeeding generations. It’s a wild ghost story, rooted in immigration and exile ... The dislocated women of Ladivine are trapped in repeating narratives of violence and loss. They are all brave women who have come from a place where events in which they are involved have already occurred, events they are unaware of but are forced to revisit. It’s a form of self-belief, finally, that saves them, regardless of how grim their fates may appear. The ending of Ladivine is perfect, both poignant and strangely hopeful.
NDiaye’s readers are forced to endure this same emotional distance, as Ladivine’s prose, brought into exacting English by her frequent translator Jordan Stump, insistently refuses them full access to her characters ... NDiaye’s refusal to immerse us within her characters’ minds makes it seem as if something crucial is being withheld, as if we are continually being presented with mere veneers—a sensation at odds with the sheer amount of attention NDiaye devotes to thoughts, feelings, and impulses ... By straddling the realistic and the fantastic, by touching on the needs of the present moment and presenting new answers to age-old dilemmas, NDiaye is writing a literature both innovative and incredible.
The parallel but non-overlapping narratives of the two Ladivines provide the novel’s most haunting effects. Yet while Ms. NDiaye addresses her themes of separation and disappearance with artistry, it is overshadowed by the book’s grim, devoutly humorless tone. Translator Jordan Stump has done faithful, diligent work, but the prose is as solemn and droning as a church organ.
The Clarisse Riviere section is something of a trial by fog, vague and repetitive, with idiosyncratic metaphors in place of plot points and long sentences full of nesting clauses that, perhaps owing to the translation, have to be read and reread to untangle their meaning ... For those who stick it out, however, there are rich rewards, particularly in the book's long middle section, narrated from the grown daughter Ladivine's point of view in firmer, more grounded prose.
When the knife falls — and it does, horribly — the daughter Ladivine plunges into a psychological labyrinth, elegantly evoked in all its horror by NDiaye. There is no happy ending for any of the characters; the only soul left unscathed is an unnamed brown dog that wanders like a ghost through the book ... In facing the bottomless sink of human existence, NDiaye demands of the reader the same clear-eyed courage that she employs crafting this haunting, disturbing novel.
In Ladivine, Stump captures the smooth slide of NDiaye’s characters from a recognizable world into a matter-of-fact magical realism in a steady, rhythmic prose that hypnotizes ... NDiaye’s writing brings together psychological realism and absurdist violence with elements of class, race and gender, but what’s truly at stake in “Ladivine” is the relationship between parents and children. Ladivine herself characterizes her husband’s rejection of his parents’ demanding love as 'his necessary initiation into hard-heartedness,' but finds herself torn between a desire to protect her children and be free of them. The liberation from obligation celebrated in the existentialist novels that have defined modern French literature for an American audience becomes a damaging weight in Ladivine.
...Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine is about identity, family, and secrets, about parents and children as they pass down their struggles and flaws from one generation to the next ...a prickly novel, difficult, strange, and brooding. It repeats itself — sometimes frustratingly so — but it does so in the service of a tone that can feel hypnotic and incantatory ...opens with a character the narrator calls Malinka, but we learn that she has taken the name Clarisse to hide from her mother Ladivine, a woman who is black and poor, and whom Malinka/Clarisse regularly calls 'the servant' ...generational misunderstandings and suspicions continue; no one in this novel is capable of full honesty with anyone else ... There is no escape, and the reader experiences their entrapment along with them, led by a narrator who rarely leaves the world of the characters’ minds.
This story requires a high level and intensity of emotional truth, and NDiaye’s prose in Ladivine, translated masterfully by Jordan Stump, completely delivers. It’s full of quiet depictions of quiet scenes with long, dreamy sentences that flow pristinely, punctuated and punctured by devastating bursts of interiority ... Ladivine is hard to get a handle on. Just when you think you understand a character, you’re ripped from their perspective and put inside the head of another. This format matches the book’s content, in which the interiority of the characters poisons their lives and the lives of those around them. The narrative follows this contagious mental disease. It’s full of abrupt surprises that make complete sense afterward, not unlike a dream, in which the line between internal and external is blurred, where cause and effect are confused, and whatever happens fits seamlessly even if it’s unclear why.
