{"id":24778,"date":"2012-08-15T19:29:23","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T19:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24778"},"modified":"2012-08-15T19:31:07","modified_gmt":"2012-08-15T19:31:07","slug":"hopes-spring-eternal-%e2%80%98three-strong-women%e2%80%99-by-marie-ndiaye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24778","title":{"rendered":"Hopes Spring Eternal: \u2018Three Strong Women,\u2019 by Marie NDiaye"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hopes Spring Eternal: \u2018Three Strong Women,\u2019 by Marie NDiaye<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-08-10<\/p>\n

Fernanda Eberstadt<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Americans have a curiously limited vision of France. We may be wild about Chanel sunglasses, Vuitton handbags, Champagne or Paris in the spring, but when it comes to the kinds of contemporary French culture that can\u2019t be bought in a duty-free shop, most of us draw a blank. Luckily, this veil of benign ignorance is being lifted as publishers in the United States introduce American readers to a new generation of hugely gifted French writers who are reworking the boundaries of fiction, memoir and history (Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re<\/a>, Laurent Binet<\/a>, the American-born Jonathan Littell<\/a>) or of high art and snuff lit (Michel Houelle\u00adbecq<\/a>). Among the recent crop of writers just reaching the top of their game, Marie NDiaye<\/a>, born in 1967 and now living in Berlin, is pre-eminent.<\/p>\n

NDiaye\u2019s career has been stellar. When she was 18, the legendary editor J\u00e9r\u00f4me Lindon<\/a> (best known as Samuel Beckett\u2019s<\/a> champion) published her first novel to high critical acclaim. Her subsequent fiction and plays have won numerous prizes and distinctions. (NDiaye\u2019s \u201cPapa Doit Manger,\u201d or \u201cDaddy\u2019s Got to Eat,\u201d produced in 2003, is the only play by a living woman to have entered the repertory of the \u00adCom\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise.) \u201cThree Strong Women<\/a>\u201d \u2014 NDiaye\u2019s most recent novel \u2014 won the Prix Goncourt<\/a> when it appeared in 2009 and made her, according to a survey by L\u2019Express-RTL, the most widely read French author of the year…<\/p>\n

…The expectation \u2014 whether menacing or well meaning \u2014 that NDiaye should \u201crepresent\u201d multiracial France, or be considered a voice of the French African diaspora, has often dogged her. In fact, as NDiaye is at pains to make clear, she scarcely knew her Senegalese father, who came to France as a student in the 1960s and returned to Africa when she was a baby. Raised by her French mother \u2014 a secondary school science teacher \u2014 in a housing project in suburban Paris, with vacations in the countryside where her maternal grandparents were farmers, NDiaye describes herself as a purely French product, with no claim to biculturalism but her surname and the color of her skin.<\/strong> Nonetheless, the absent father \u2014 charismatic, casually cruel, voraciously selfish \u2014 haunts NDiaye\u2019s fiction and drama, as does the shadow of a dreamlike Africa in which demons and evil portents abound, where the unscrupulous can make overnight fortunes and, with another turn of the wheel, find themselves rotting in a jail cell…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hopes Spring Eternal: \u2018Three Strong Women,\u2019 by Marie NDiaye The New York Times 2012-08-10 Fernanda Eberstadt Americans have a curiously limited vision of France. We may be wild about Chanel sunglasses, Vuitton handbags, Champagne or Paris in the spring, but when it comes to the kinds of contemporary French culture that can\u2019t be bought in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,28,25],"tags":[11549,96,6083,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-24778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-europe","category-women","tag-fernanda-eberstadt","tag-france","tag-marie-ndiaye","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}