Marie NDiaye, Autoportrait en vert
Our Reading Journey
Our session opened on the banks of the Garonne, mid-flood, watching a woman in a French village wait to see whether the water will breach the levee. That domestic vigilance sets the tone for what follows: driving her children to school, the narrator passes a farmhouse she's seen daily for years and, one ordinary morning, notices for the first time a woman in green standing motionless by a banana tree. She asks her children if they see her too. They don't. From there, green women multiply through her life: an old friend, a former acquaintance who turns out to have been dead for a decade, and eventually her own mother; each appearance leaves the narrator's account of her own life a little less certain than the one before. Photographs meant to document these encounters show blurred faces and empty gardens instead of proof.
The discussion that followed turned to the old tradition of the tale and the fantastic, and to the particular unease those stories still produce when no rational explanation arrives to close the account. The most unsettling of the green women turns out to be the narrator's own mother, a woman she once described as a life of stone, until a new husband and a young daughter in Marseille render her unrecognizable in a single visit. We talked about the temptation to write the narrator off as an unreliable, perhaps unwell mind and about why that reflex felt too easy, a way of protecting our sense of a coherent world rather than an honest response to what the book actually asks of us. What lingered longest was the question the novel keeps circling without ever quite answering: what is the fantastic saying here that a straightforward account of these women's lives could not?
About the Author
Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers to a French mother and a Senegalese father who separated before her first birthday; she grew up outside Paris, raised by her mother, a schoolteacher, alongside her brother, the historian Pap Ndiaye. She began writing around age twelve and published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, at seventeen with Éditions de Minuit, the house of Beckett and Duras. Rosie Carpe won the Prix Femina in 2001, and Trois femmes puissantes won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, the year she left France for Berlin in protest of Nicolas Sarkozy's election. She has also written for the stage and screen, including the Comédie-Française production of Papa doit manger and the screenplay for Saint Omer, co-written with Alice Diop and selected to represent France at the Academy Awards. Autoportrait en vert, published in 2005, predates most of this recognition: an early, formally restless entry in a body of work built around unstable identity and quiet menace beneath ordinary French provincial life.
