a sensual portrayal of the indispensable place of talented cooks in the world of the French bourgeoisie. NDiaye’s heroine doesn’t wield overt power over this class, but instead commits herself to delivering savory before sugar, invention and technique before pleasure.

Writing against cliché—e.g., cooking is a site of carnage, not delight—is vital to NDiaye’s novels. Borrowing from Freud, supernatural thriller, and family saga, her work is famously difficult to classify ... Reading NDiaye is akin to coming across a previous patient’s psychological assessment on your therapist’s desk; you’re hopelessly drawn in, even as you ought to look away ... In The Cheffe...it is the narrator’s unreliability,...that generates NDiaye’s characteristic mystery and menace ... It is typical of NDiaye to transform bourgeois pleasures—French cuisine, tropical vacations, interior design—into discomfiting forms of mild torture ... At end, there are those who will complain that NDiaye’s work is 'too challenging' to enjoy. But novels that go down easy come with hazards of their own: as our narrator warns, 'you don’t feel respected as a customer and an eater, you feel ashamed for the cook.'

Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement ... On first read, I was disappointed with The Cheffe. Compared to NDiaye’s other great novels, The Cheffe feels a little simple: it’s the story of a man’s infatuation with his former boss. It’s far more coherent in style and content than NDiaye’s previous works, plays less with genre, lacks the strange plasticity that makes reading her books something like handing over your ticket at the entrance of a haunted house. And yet, as I thought about and reread NDiaye’s mirror-smooth prose, I wondered: What am I not seeing? ... NDiaye illustrates the class dynamics of the kitchen: who sips from a spoon and who wields a knife ... Translator Jordan Stump...has done a wonderful job here ... as often happens in NDiaye’s work, the violence of the past is merely punted to the next generation. For now, they may still hope to do things differently.

It seems unlikely that the Goncourt Prize-winning author Marie NDiaye set out to be the Camus of cuisine, but her latest novel, The Cheffe, brings to mind a number of parallels with the much-revered 1942 French novel The Stranger. First of all, its narrative is laid out in the first person, entirely in flashback. Second, the loner narrator seems to have an ambivalent relationship with his memory. And third, the novel is populated with somewhat astringent characters who aren’t much on small talk ... The Cheffe herself is somewhat inscrutable in a quintessentially Gallic way; obviously passionate about her food, but outwardly indifferent to the response it gets ... And like a great meal, The Cheffe leaves us pleasantly sated but still wanting more.

Lauded French-Senegalese author NDiaye...introduces the otherwise-unnamed 'Cheffe,' a woman so consumed with creating unique culinary delicacies that this desire overrules everything else in her life ... Hauntingly original and told in a conversational tone that quickly makes readers feel they are the narrator’s confidants, this is another entry in NDiaye’s already impressive volume of work.

Descriptions of the recipes she develops and the meals she concocts tantalize ... NDiaye has given deep thought to how a feminine genius might approach cuisine...However, she’s given even deeper thought to how difficult it is for feminine genius to shine and succeed in a man’s world ... might ultimately be a meditation on the impossibility of combining an artistic life with a family life. And yet, the Cheffe makes it work in her own way, and her story feels like it’s being told at just the right time.

... who is telling this story? An unnecessary device I’m afraid. It is disappointing to find a writer as talented as NDiaye employ a narrator who is, sure, unreliable, but in discursive and extremely frustrating ways ... Nothing can be said about the Cheffe that isn’t filtered through a narrator who smacks of a mechanism merely for plot contrivance. The Cheffe is eternally enigmatic, until she is not. The Cheffe is boundlessly independent, until she is not. The Cheffe comes from poverty and knows there is genuine dignity in it, but the novel keeps forgetting all about that. That last one stings most. NDiaye is a writer with a great many talents, but the primary talent The Cheffe uses is her deftness with the matter of social class ... even with such a grave misstep, NDiaye’s spry prose and psychological acuity — in a translation from Jordan Stump — are on display, dimmed greatly, but not gone. How the Cheffe goes from indigence to somebody with razor-eyed, almost-mystical levels of culinary brilliance is the real story, and the most intriguing part of the book ... NDiaye supplies mouth-watering detail ... When the whole point of a story is so incisive and provocative, it is sad to see the whole carry such an irrelevant burden ... But most of all, the question The Cheffe raises for its high-minded, literary audience: Is Marie NDiaye the only acclaimed novelist willing to be self-aware, even guilty, of her own stature?

... offers up fascinating details of her creative approach and the perils of running a master restaurant, yet for all the lavish description, there are intriguing absences. The narrator’s life story emerges only as reflected through the assistant, whose name we don’t learn. Even the cheffe is referred to only by her title—evidently, a French female chef is so remarkable that the word cheffe was only recently coined. Given the acolyte’s obsession with the cheffe and his palpable contempt for her daughter, the reader is intrigued by what he might be concealing ... Despite its holes, this is a finely constructed work with a surprising and satisfying ending, like a fine meal leading up to a delicious dessert.

At times, the novel is less about the Cheffe and more about this man’s idea of her ... The novel breeds fascination, and the narrator’s obsession with the Cheffe is catching. Words about this unknowable character feel full of crucial details and, as the reader hopes, perhaps in the telling of the story there will be one detail that gives the Cheffe away, that reveals the source of her grandeur, that allows the reader to understand her ... Still, NDiaye surprises us when the Cheffe’s fame fades during more intimate moments. When the narrator tells of the midnight kitchen hours when he and the Cheffe could speak openly, NDiaye’s writing reaches a beautiful honesty. The strange loveliness of them meeting in such an unlikely space is peaceful and genuine, private and therefore more intimate ... NDiaye utilizes the relationships between these characters to observe the wide scope of love in our lives, how it drives us, and where. Despite sparse dialogue, the thoughts and innermost lives of these characters take the forefront, and what they say out loud to each other is far less important than what they mean.

...[an] engrossing psychological novel ... Like the Cheffe’s recipes, at first tantalizingly simple but eventually so austere they threaten to 'tumble into fruitlessness' and become useless, the narrator’s efforts to describe the Cheffe’s mind and heart are both enthralling and fundamentally unreliable as a record of her life. Readers will be consumed by this tale of talent and obsession, even as the Cheffe herself remains both fascinating and mysterious.

To present the story of a renowned restaurateur known only as the Cheffe, NDiaye...has created a uniquely unreliable (and unnamed) narrator ... So eccentric, long-winded, and overblown, it's almost endearing.