Ladivine

February 29, 2016
Sadness, regret, and insidious dread permeate every page of this beautifully crafted, relentless novel. NDiaye’s (All My Friends) story chronicles a curse handed down from mother to daughter. Ladivine, a woman of mysterious origin, raises a daughter, Malinka, in France. A haughty child who has never known her father, Malinka begins to refer to her mother simply as “the servant” and eventually leaves home. She makes a new life for herself as Clarisse, and though she travels once a month to visit Ladivine in Bordeaux, she coldheartedly reveals not a single detail of her new life, not even about her husband, Richard, or that she has a daughter, also named Ladivine. But the vacant Clarisse must pay for her coldness. Richard leaves Clarisse, and years later, when Clarisse decides to go back to being Malinka—perhaps her true self—murderous consequences ensue after she shares the truth about her past with a sinister new boyfriend. Terrible, eerie things happen to the younger Ladivine when she goes on holiday with her own husband and two children, to a foreign (and unspecified) land that NDiaye hints may be the place where her namesake was born. Most unsettling is that people in this hot, poor country seem to believe they have seen Ladivine before, that indeed they know her. A familial strain of darkness runs through the lives of these women, and they must atone. Themes concerning race, as well as supernatural forces, sometimes canine in form, always lurk nearby in this tale.

Marie NDiaye offers a generational story of a family of women who seem to be living under a cloud of ill fortune. Narrator Tavia Gilbert illuminates the thoughts and emotions of Ladivine Sylla, an immigrant to France from a third-world country, as well as those of her female descendants. In this elegant translation by Jordan Stump, Gilbert makes NDiaye's exquisite lyrical prose breathe as she offers poignant portrayals of each character's anguish. Ladivine has a daughter who changes her name to Clarisse and passes as white. Clarisse has a child, also named Ladivine, who has little awareness of her black namesake. The women's lives are fraught with turmoil and all tend to end badly. Mysteries unfold, and time is fluid in this challenging novel, but Gilbert holds us captive throughout. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

February 1, 2017

Race, class, and identity all loom large in NDiaye's (Three Strong Women) latest superb title as generations of mothers and daughters attempt to deny and reclaim one another with onerous consequences. The original Ladivine immigrates to France from an unnamed country, cleaning houses to support daughter Malinka. Unlike Ladivine, Malinka passes for white, enabling her to invent a new identity at school and later as Clarisse Riviere, a comfortably middle-class wife and mother of a daughter she names Ladivine. Clarisse secretly visits her mother every Tuesday, but her precariously fabricated existence implodes when her husband leaves her and she gets involved with a troubled outcast, eventually ending in gruesome violence. Her now-adult daughter Ladivine (the second) must deal with the tragic outcome. NDiaye, a teenaged publishing prodigy with a dozen-plus acclaimed books and plays over the last few decades, undoubtedly deserves wider international recognition. VERDICT Discovering NDiaye on the page might prove preferable to the audio format. Although serviceable, Tavia Gilbert's overly youthful voice detracts from NDiaye's chilling, reflective, and deliberate prose. ["This strangely hypnotic novel exudes anguish and loneliness. NDiaye...writes profoundly disturbing novels in such riveting prose that one cannot look away": LJ 3/16 starred review of the Knopf hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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