Vengeance is mine by Marie Ndiaye

Vengeance is mine by Marie Ndiaye

French Fiction

Original title –La vengeance m’appartient

Translator – Jordan Stump

Source – review copies

No wonder I never get sent books. I fall behind in my review copies all the time I am just a butterfly read floating here and there, but I need to use my social media more for new books and review them quicker anyway, enough about me. But this is one I should get to soon I have read reviews of two other books from the Prix Goncourt winner Marie Ndiaye and have loved them. She is a writer I think is just getting better she has won the Goncourt longlist for the International Booker and also the International Dublin Literary Award. This was her last novel to be published in French. She is very good at using various threads of stories in her books, and this is the same with this book, all based around the case of a woman accused of killing her three children.

“Sharon, you should have gone home, they’ve shut down the tram for the night.”

Me Susane turned off the riotous lights beaming down from the ceiling.

Sharon, you don’t have to switch on every light in the apartment, M° Susane didn’t say either, because that mark of respect, that show of thoughtfulness you think you have to offer your employer when she comes home late and tired by dazzlingly illuminating her entrance, none of that suits my spirit of frugality, economy and temperance in every act of daily life, no, Sharon, really, switch on only the lights you can’t do without for your work, M° Susane would never, absolutely never, tell her.

Sharon her strange and wonderful Housekeeper

As with her other books, Ndiaye is a weaver of subplots and side stories in this book, as the main driving force in the book is Gillers Principaux, a husband trying to find a lawyer for his wife Marlyne, who is accused of killing their three sons. He arrives at the offices of Maitre Susane small town law practice. She feels she knows this man, and that is one of the threads through the book, a long-hidden event in her youth that involves this man. The other is her trying to find out what happened with Marlyne, who on the surface, is seemingly a normal housewife living a perfect life. But is that what made her break. Then we have another story of Susane’s housekeeper Sharon and her husband who are they? Why is some of the paperwork that Susane needs seemingly lost? how will she react when she hears her employer is defending this woman accused of killing her sons. What did the couple say about what they did after the children were found dead/ Will Susane remember those events many years ago?

Because Gilles Principaux seemed not so much devastated by the death of his children as bent on absolving Marlyne in the eyes of the world.

And why not? thought Me Susane.

And what did it mean to be “devastated”, what unambiguous conclusion was there to be drawn from Gilles Principaux’s dry eyes, his strange smiles before the cameras, his obvious pleasure in holding forth on the horror of it all?

According to what unassailable criteria, both moral and psychological, could one conclude, simply because he smiled so abundantly, that his children’s deaths did not affect him as deeply as they should?

Those unsavoury, vengeful sites had put their finger on one true thing, thought Me Susane: Gilles Principaux had an unusual reaction to the event that was supposed to have shattered his existence.

These lines made me think of the Parents Of Maddie and how there reactions where looked at so closely after she disappeared

I loved this I can see why others hate it as it is one of those books that is like many great French films where what is happening is never quite sure. I think of films like Le Boucher, where a murderer is slowly revealed or last year in Marianbad, where events from the past are forgotten. There is so. many levels and twists in this book. If you take the best physiological thrillers from Highsmith or Du Maurier, throw in some French noir, childhood secrets and then a housekeeper and family with their own secrets. I keep seeing this book in cinematic terms and maybe that is me imaging how it would make a great film with the flashbacks at youth side plots and the whole infanticide, which I have barely mentioned I experienced the feeling that this many years ago in another French novella Beside the sea saw a mother kill her children as well. This is a very French book it seems to me. Ndiaye takes us to dark places and looks at how memory works and how the past ripples into the present. Have you read her books? Have you ever read a book and thought that would just be a stunning film?

Winston’s score – A – One of the greatest living French writers does it again