Opening an NDiaye novel is a little like coming to in the middle of a party after a blackout: the setting may be unfamiliar, but the action is under way, and all you can do is join in ... or all the praise NDiaye has received, I’ve seen little mention, at least in English, of how funny she is ... Though there are no bloody tears rolling down my cheeks, let me close with an act of divination: Marie NDiaye will win the Nobel Prize.
Artfully rendered by her longtime translator, Jordan Stump ... It bears few time stamps tying it to the moment of its creation. NDiaye’s terrain is psychological; her preferred form a singular mash-up of horror, fairy tale and fable ... Classic NDiaye. Taut, spellbinding and strange, it unfolds with the disturbed logic of a fever dream, showcasing its author’s recurring preoccupations ... NDiaye, a specialist in characters in extremis, chronicles Lucie’s mounting panic with exacting precision, her sentences charting a welter of feeling.
Disquieting, hypnotic, haunting ... Spellbinding ... The Witch is dreamlike, elliptical, unsettling and beautiful. It might not be NDiaye’s best work, but it’s still better than most of that of her peers — and well deserving of its inclusion in this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist.
NDiaye’s story moves with unnerving ease between realism and the fantastical ... Throughout the book you keep expecting Lucie’s powers (weak though they are) to offer a route out of her bleak circumstances — there must be spells, surely, for bad marriages, for disappointing parents — but NDiaye withholds such satisfactions. Magic here is neither glamorous nor that effective. It’s often beside the point. Instead, the novel becomes an uncanny exploration of motherhood and disappointment, and of the uneasy inheritance passed between parents and children ... The effect is faintly Kafkaesque; everything is legible yet nothing quite makes sense ... The Witch lingers ... If television trains us to expect coherence and the comfort of recognition, The Witch denies it.
Written in engrossing stream of consciousness prose, this translated novel offers a subtle, haunting meditation on motherhood, marriage, and the tension between nurturing and trapping family members.
NDiaye’s novel will keep readers engrossed with its supernaturalism mixed with suburban bourgeois banalities. Anyone interested in late 20th-century French culture and literature will find this book entertaining but also bittersweet.
