The Cheffe

August 15, 2019
A saint in the kitchen: the legend of a culinary genius recounted by her most devoted disciple. "Every day I get something from what my love made of me, and if I can live my life on good terms with myself it's only because my exclusive, absolute, imperishable love transformed the boy I was, conventionally eager to succeed, ordinary, pragmatic, into a young man capable of marveling and sacrificing." To present the story of a renowned restaurateur known only as the Cheffe, NDiaye (Ladivine, 2016, etc.) has created a uniquely unreliable (and unnamed) narrator, the chef's former apprentice and No. 1 fan, now living in boozy retirement on the Spanish Mediterranean. In his hands, the life of the Cheffe is a hagiographic fairy tale, complete with an ugly witch--the Cheffe's daughter, whom the narrator is still furiously fighting for favor even long after his mentor's death. "I have my own opinion, you've met her, you've seen that unpleasant, sterile woman, arrogant and vain and now trying to peddle specious anecdotes about the Cheffe to the whole wide world." The preferred version of the story--the narrator's version--begins once upon a time in the village of Sainte-Bazeille, where a sweet little girl was born to destitute farm laborers. They put her to work in the fields, then sent her away as a teenager to work for some wealthy weirdos in a neighboring town. Obsessed with food, the Clapeaus install the girl in their kitchen, where she discovers her vocation: "Now, moved and joyous, she realized her body was made up of many little animals who'd learned to work flawlessly all on their own, and who, that afternoon, happy, modest, at once obediently and quietly enterprising, showed her all their savoir faire, working as a tight-knit team that in a sense excluded the Cheffe for her own good." My, my. The mice and bluebirds that sewed Cinderella's ball gown take a backseat to these industrious creatures. What specious anecdotes could that awful daughter possibly come up with to match these? So eccentric, long-winded, and overblown, it's almost endearing.

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August 19, 2019
The life and career of a majestically talented, intensely private master chef is narrated by her greatest admirer and loyal employee in NDiaye’s engrossing psychological novel (following My Heart Hemmed In). Born in the early 1950s in the southwestern French town of Sainte-Bazeille, to a large, poor family, the Cheffe leaves school at 14 to work as a maid for the Clapeaus, a wealthy older couple who “loved eating with a fervent, unrelenting love.” She finds her calling in replacing the Clapeaus’ vacationing cook and goes on to devote herself to cooking, moving through kitchens “with the kind of controlled, dynamic, galvanizing intentness that attracted miraculous ideas” and eventually opening her own award-winning restaurant. But this single-mindedness is also the source of painful lifelong conflict between the Cheffe and her only daughter, whom the narrator resents for what he sees as ingratitude. Deeply in love with the taciturn Cheffe, who makes him her confidante but doesn’t return his feelings, the narrator acknowledges his bias but insists on the accuracy of his insights. Like the Cheffe’s recipes, at first tantalizingly simple but eventually so austere they threaten to “tumble into fruitlessness” and become useless, the narrator’s efforts to describe the Cheffe’s mind and heart are both enthralling and fundamentally unreliable as a record of her life. Readers will be consumed by this tale of talent and obsession, even as the Cheffe herself remains both fascinating and mysterious.

October 1, 2019

Prix Goncourt-winning, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award short-listed NDiaye (Three Good Women) here presents the life story of a fictional female chef who inspired France's minimalist nouvelle cuisine, told entirely in the voice of a devoted younger male employee. The novel seems like a documentary, with the camera focused in tightly on the narrator as he effusively recounts his boss's rise from poverty in provincial France to become proprietor of a Michelin-starred restaurant. He offers up fascinating details of her creative approach and the perils of running a master restaurant, yet for all the lavish description, there are intriguing absences. The narrator's life story emerges only as reflected through the assistant, whose name we don't learn. Even the cheffe is referred to only by her title--evidently, a French female chef is so remarkable that the word cheffe was only recently coined. Given the acolyte's obsession with the cheffe and his palpable contempt for her daughter, the reader is intrigued by what he might be concealing. VERDICT Despite its holes, this is a finely constructed work with a surprising and satisfying ending, like a fine meal leading up to a delicious dessert. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/19.]--Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2019
Lauded French-Senegalese author NDiaye (Ladivine, 2016) introduces the otherwise-unnamed "Cheffe," a woman so consumed with creating unique culinary delicacies that this desire overrules everything else in her life. Her story is told by an unnamed narrator, a former student and admirer who has an obsession of his own: single-minded dedication to recounting the Cheffe's story along with his own interpretations. As the novel progresses, readers learn that although the Cheffe enjoys some aspects of the fame that her culinary prowess affords her, she is stubbornly secretive about the rest of her life. When she becomes pregnant and must choose between her work and her baby, she ultimately decides to leave the child to her family, and focus on opening a restaurant: a choice that comes back to haunt her in the future in ways that readers won't have predicted. Hauntingly original, and told in a conversational tone that quickly makes readers feel they are the narrator's confidants, this is another entry in NDiaye's already impressive volume of work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)