Three Strong Women is a major work of world literature, and one that deserves a readership in English as well as in French ... NDiaye's book is hardly the modish 'interlocking narratives' novel it first appears to be. The author shows Norah from all angles — as a woman, a daughter, a lover, a sister — but our second strong woman is in fact largely absent. Instead, the author follows her impulsive and paranoid husband over the course of an epically horrible day ... NDiaye's prose, rendered into mostly supple English by John Fletcher, luxuriates in paragraph-long introspection and occasionally dips into the supernatural ... Her rich, sensuous style takes some getting used to. But give it time. Three Strong Women is a rare novel, capturing the grand scope of migration, from Africa to Europe and back, and the inner lives of very different people caught between pride and despair.
Marie NDiaye, one of France's most exciting prose stylists and playwrights, succeeds with elegance, grit and some painful comedy in Three Strong Women, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2009. Moving mainly between France and Senegal, this novel explores survival, inheritance and the feared repetition of history – within families, as between peoples. Its three heroines have an unassailable sense of their own self-worth, while their psychological battles have an almost mythic resonance ... It can take a while to acclimatise to NDiaye's style, which incorporates a thread of hallucinatory symbolism about flowers and flight. John Fletcher's translation rightly preserves long sentences that can, at times, verge on awkwardness. But the prose compels with its astonishing range and precision.
It is, however, the book’s middle novella — a masterpiece of narrative ingenuity and emotional extremes — that proves NDiaye to be a writer of the highest caliber ... NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people’s lives. This clearsightedness — combined with her subtle narrative sleights of hand and her willingness to broach essential subjects like the fate of would-be migrants to the rich North — gives her fiction a rare integrity that shines through the sinuous prose. (Slightly less sinuous in John Fletcher’s occasionally stilted translation, which is a little too slow to warm up: the book’s only flaw) ... Yet through these distorting lenses of madness and deprivation, NDiaye manages nonetheless to convey a redemptive realism about how the world works, and what makes people tick.
Marie NDiaye soon establishes herself as a writer who dissects her characters with impressive forensic detail, the subtlest speech inflection or gesture put under the microscope ... The novel is in the fashionable style of the discontinuous narrative, the plot, as such, embedded in a scramble of thoughts, feelings, scenes, memories and time-shifts, sometimes resembling stream-of-consciousness and eschewing the closure of more traditional endings. But if you're prepared to abandon the strictures of convention, it's a great read. While the 'non-ending-endings' strategy might risk being dissatisfying, it forces a deeper intellectual engagement. In the absence of answers, we reflect on what we've read, and because we don't know what happens to the characters, they linger in the mind – especially Rudy, whose hectic interiority is so compelling.
Long wandering sentences and stories within and of themselves are not necessarily a trait of all African writers, but tend to dominate much of the language, as it does with Ms. NDiaye’s, even though she was raised in France and now lives in Germany ... No one really comes into his or her own power or feels complete and whole. The stories tell tales and let us know what people are thinking and feeling, but there is little progression, change, or insight with the characters ... There is no salvation. Everyone is doomed to live life as it is. In some respects, this is refreshing and realistic, but readers usually read in order to be taken out of our quotidian monotony, not for immersion in the minds of characters who have accepted the hopelessness of life as it is ... These stories torment readers with the possibilities and unfulfilled potential to which they could have aspired.
With such tough, sinuously winding sentences NDiaye chronicles how women survive whatever life puts in front of them, whether in the form of mortal or moral peril. Each occupies some space that takes place in both Africa and Europe. Although NDiaye rarely writes of the racism they face (Rudy’s mother rejecting his son for his African features is perhaps the most overt), the vestigial scars of colonialism are evident throughout. Invoking repeated imagery of birds and trees (not the pretty versions: These are attacking birds and overripe, rotting fruit trees), NDiaye’s storytelling approaches something of the power and simplicity of folklore ... There is good and evil here, and as in the world they are blended confusingly and only slowly revealed. In the interplay between Europe and Africa, between men and women, NDiaye finds both beauty and beasts.
Though it is written in the third person, the prose of Three Strong Women rarely transcends the muddled perspectives of each section’s main character. Key information arrives late or not at all, making the story itself sometimes difficult to follow ... NDiaye’s meandering and languid prose style perfectly suits her plot. In the novel, as well as in the characters’ minds, what has happened before becomes interwoven with forgetfulness and conflicting memories. In its translation to English, translator John Fletcher occasionally loses the subtle momentum that French so easily maintains, falling instead into a mire of clause-ridden, sluggish paragraphs. Yet the novel, which initially evades its reader by never offering enough information for full understanding, becomes vivid with the wrenching conclusion of its final storyline ... At times exhaustingly tangled in the depressed and circular thoughts of its characters, Three Strong Women nevertheless concludes with unanticipated connection and meaning, even as complete understanding and success for its characters remain illusory.
There will be no tidy resolutions or neat transitions in the telling of complicated lives ... NDiaye's prose can at times be complicated and borderline convoluted. She writes in long sentences that double back and digress. After a few pages, however, what at first may have seemed awkward starts to feel hypnotic - the repetitions create momentum, the digressions amass precision ... She is an impressive stylist with a strong voice, which John Fletcher has admirably preserved in this translation. More problematic is the overuse of heavy-handed symbolism relating to plants and birds, and in the case of Norah and Rudy, the too obvious outward manifestation of inward emotional states ... But these are minor quibbles in light of so compelling a novel - one that examines bravely and from both sides the collision of Europe and Africa (both as ideas and lived realities) and the significance this collision has had and continues to have on black and white lives.
Despite its title, Three Strong Women is not, strictly speaking, about three women; nor are the women who do appear particularly strong or powerful. In fact, the women of NDiaye’s loosely connected triptych find themselves in precarious situations, physically and emotionally, even as they inhabit vastly different, though intersecting, worlds ... These crisscrossing lives and unsteady unions caught between Europe and Africa beg the question: Who is escaping, and who has arrived? The novel works wonderfully as a triptych, the stories carefully echoing and extending each other. And even if there is some unevenness (the first section can seem stilted and wooden compared to the parts that follow), in the end the book comes together, especially as Khady does discover the key to her own internal strength and willpower.
Each woman calls upon great strength to survive amid failure and humiliation, a feat that goes unnoticed by those around them. NDiaye’s quiet intelligence is made apparent by the complexity of her characters and her intuitive prose in this subtly beautiful novel.
The three women personifying the complicated relationship between France and Senegal in French-born NDiaye’s tripartite novel, winner of France’s Prix Concourt in 2009, need all the strength they can muster as they struggle to survive ... Unrelenting in its anger, pain and sorrow, but hard to put down.
