The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood ... A master at agitating, probing and upending expectations ... She presents a new litter of misfits and constructs one of her most beguiling and visceral tales ... NDiaye deals in impressions and captures a particular kind of emotional delirium in Vengeance. She leans into jaggedness, twisting her narrative to mimic Maître Susane’s fraying psychological state as she searches for a kind of truth.
A story of class conflict embedded within a psychological thriller, is scattered with interpretive hints, clues to the crimes of contemporary French society. Though it starts with a date on the calendar, the story works like a map ... In this elegantly layered tale of social stratification, NDiaye takes us through a maze of alleyways, backstreets, and elegant foyers, until we are dizzy from trying to chart the course of upward mobility and eager for a place to rest—a way out rather than in ... NDiaye treats politics and the material conditions it creates as forces that lead to unpredictable, idiosyncratic outcomes. She never lets her characters be flattened to make a point.
The central ideas in Vengeance Is Mine are, thrillingly, as difficult to pin down as the identities of its characters. In one light, it’s a scathing look at the simmering desperation provoked by France’s rigid structures of authority and power. But it’s also an uber-feminist rewriting of a plot made familiar by texts from Medea ... In the hands of a less skilled writer, that ambiguous mix might feel forced, or like an evasive way out of thinking rigorously about a challenging psychological subject. But NDiaye...is a poet of uncertainty. Her ability to simultaneously embody all the fractured parts of a character’s mind makes aspects of Susane’s spiral that might otherwise seem unbelievable...come across as engrossingly, utterly human.
Superbly controlled ... Throughout, the icy, bright audacity of NDiaye’s language made me scrawl inch-high exclamation points of delight in the margins ... No life, no matter how modest or compromised or confused, is banal; through her telling and her talents, stray, lone consciousnesses are magnified to the epic.
The novel’s tension turns around the gap between its main character’s self-knowledge, the perception of others, and reality ... Creates a sense of both claustrophobia and mystery; we remain locked inside of Maître Susane’s thoughts and perceptions, just as we remained locked within our own.
Magnetic and intense ... The author is equally adept at both small-scale psychological character insight and virtuosic structural shifts—the highlight of the novel is a harrowing, unforgettable 10-page monologue that Marlyne delivers from behind bars. Ndiaye turns in another ferocious tale.
