Mon coeur à l'étroit

by Marie NDiaye

Nadia, la narratrice, est institutrice à Bordeaux dans la même école que son mari, Ange. Ils vivent leur profession comme un apostolat et en tirent une authentique félicité. Mais depuis quelque temps le couple est l'objet d'une vindicte générale, harcelante et inexplicable. Personne ne les regarde plus en face, personne n'accepte d'entendre le son de leurs voix, les enfants ont peur d'eux... Nadia tente de comprendre la nature du complot qui la broie, tandis qu'un brouillard épais ensevelit Bordeaux. Quelle faute a-t-elle commise, qui justifierait ses malheurs? Pourquoi son fils s'est-il éloigné d'elle? Ange est-il vraiment son allié dans l'épreuve? Et qui est ce voisin qui les accable de propos lénifiants, ce Noget qu'ils avaient toujours méprisé et qui s'impose peu à peu comme leur protecteur tout-puissant?

Genres: Fiction, Horror, France, Magical Realism, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, 21st Century

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She started writing when she was twelve or thirteen years old and was only eighteen when her first work was published. In 2001 she was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina literary prize for her novel Rosie Carpe, and in 2009, she won the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women.

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 "surreal, terrifying, provocative" stars !!!

The Silver Award Winner of 2019 (second favorite read)

In 2016 I read Ms. NDiaye's 2009 Prix Goncourt Award winning novel Three Strong Women and it became my Silver Award winner that year. That novel continues to haunt me and I needed to read more by this extremely intelligent, empathic and superb author.

I chose this book published in 2007 but only translated into English in 2017.



I really did not know what I was getting into when I started this. This novel took over my inner life and I had to put my other books aside once I entered this frightening surreal universe. This book made me think, caused great waves of existential anxiety and layers of revulsion that I bravely needed to unpeel in order to both benefit and grow.

Nadia is middle aged, a school teacher, on her second marriage, upper middle class in the city of Bordeaux France. Initially we know very little about her, what is her race, her ethnicity, her upbringing, her personal story. What we do know is that she is hugely disliked by the community, her family and her friends. The city seems to turn against her at every corner, people are either disgusted, afraid or angry at her. Her husband is wounded and starts to wither away. A much reviled neighbour begins to care for him and dominate her. His name is Noget but is he perhaps Godot. She grows fatter and fatter and wants to escape to her estranged son's island home but how to get there when the whole city conspires against her. Is she delusional, paranoid or of sound mind ?

Throughout the novel we find out more about Nadia and we, as readers, grow to dislike her, some of us may begin to despise her. She is racist, sexist, classist, then we find out how she has hurt those that have loved through her cruel and sometimes abusive ways. Nadia is certainly guilty of much but is she criminal? What more does she hide ? What is growing inside of her? Who are the strange characters that she collides with? Is there any chance of redemption for her?

Nadia will inhabit my being for quite some time and through her minor atrocities keeps me in check and I endeavor to not fall into any of her upper middle class monstrosities !

Ms. Ndiaye you astound me with your dark genius !

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now and then, at first, I think I catch people scowling in my direction. They can’t really mean me, can they?

Marie NDiaye's Ladivine was a real discovery for me from the 2016 Man Booker International, and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award, so I was delighted that my Two Lines Press subscription included another NDiaye novel, Heart Hemmed In (published earlier in the original).

The good news is that it is perhaps even stronger than Ladivine and I would be disappointed if it doesn't feature in the award season next year.

The translation, as with Ladivine, is by the excellent Jordan Stump, and this interview (https://catranslation.org/blog-post/i...) was very helpful in understanding the book.

Nadia and her husband Ange are teachers in Bordeaux, and are, they believe, well regarded by pupils and parents alike. But one day Nadia notices a change in the way people are treating them (as per the quote above), which Ange also senses, but is reluctant to discuss. The disdain gradually escalates to open hostility and culminates with Ange one day being gravely wounded at school (albeit exactly what happened is never explicit).

Nadia remains bemused as to what exactly they (or perhaps only her?) have done wrong,

We're convinced of our innocence, but ashamed all the same.

Her confusion is not helped by the fact that others, even those less hostile, seem to regard it as too self-evident to require explanation. Her pharmacist tells her:

That's what you must understand, oh please won't you understand, that ... there's nothing special about you and your husband. It's not you, not exactly you that this ugliness is attacking, and besides, who around here even knows you? Apart from a few people, who, like me ... But no, it's not you, it's ... how can I put it ... the untouchability of what you are, your ... your stiffness, your purity, your manner, your habits, oh, how can I put it."

"We're exactly like you," I say.

"So you think," she says, "but, oh God, you don't understand, and I don't know how to ... you're so different, so profoundly ... excessive."

Although as even Ange points out to Nadia, she may simply not be seeing what is obvious:

The trouble with you is you only know what you want to know.

As we discover more of Ange and Nadia’s life we see that they do indeed set themselves apart. Nadia herself calls it – in a wonderful phrase: arrogant conjugal seclusion.

They look in contempt, in a Bernhardian fashion people who e.g. watch TV, drive large cars, have dogs, hunt (There's no breed more despicable than hunters. Every hunter in this country should be executed, Ange used to say.).

They themselves don’t watch TV, and only listen to classical music or jazz on the radio: several people point out this may account for their ignorance of what is happening around and to them.

They looked down on a retired teacher living in their block, who turns out to be their only supporter when these events occur, but also proves to be a renowned author, Richard Victor Noget, writing on the subject of education, even a TV personality: their ignorance of his identity again being used as others of evidence of their difference.

And despite being well-off, they are very careful with their money, on shopping trips their greatest pleasure comes from not consummating purchases: the "euphoria ... of walking out of a shop with empty hands and full pockets."

Ange and Nadia have no lasting friendships, but Nadia in particular has broken off relationships with her family (not having spoken to them for over 30 years) and with her less successful first husband: we learn that unlike Ange, who is from traditional Bordeaux stock, she comes from a poorer area around the city and admits to the cold hatred I felt for the environment I'd pulled myself out of, which extends to having misled Ange that her parents are dead.

Nadia has a son from her first marriage, but when he has a child she avoids meeting her granddaughter or his wife, worried about her appearance and the risk that her son had perpetuated the indignity of our bloodline, an obsession heightened when she first hears the name the child has been given:

that choice of name, "Souhar", which I can't think about without feeling a pain like a kick to the stomach, which is to say a humiliating, undeserved pain, as well as a violent one."

The novel, as with Ladivine, takes a hallucinatory twist. Noget’s support involves feeding them such gourmet food that Nadia worries he is fattening them up to some sinister end: only for it to appear that her increasing weight might actually be due to a rather disturbing pregnancy. She eventually visits her son, only to find that his wife has mysteriously disappeared to be replaced by another creepily controlling woman who closely monitors his every move, and that he doesn’t want to discuss where his baby daughter now lives.

And she finds that even the physical city itself seems to have turned on her, as she finds herself getting lost in seeming permanent fog, with streets that carry on for ever and places no longer where she remembers, despite having lived in the city for decades.

And my heart is cornered, surrounded by the baying pack, and it’s hammering on the wall of my chest, wishing it could break out of its cramped cage, my poor aging heart, my poor trembling heart. I was born right here in Bordeaux, in Les Aubiers neighbourhood; I’ve spent my whole life in this city, and I love it with a fraternal tenderness, like a human soul mate. But now I find Bordeaux slipping away from me, enigmatically shunning my friendship, its streets seemingly changing their look and direction (is it only the fog? I ask myself), its citizens grown hostile over the past few months (and I’d gotten used to that and it had, over time, become bearable), seeming no longer to hate me exactly, but to be stalking me.

Although from these rather disturbing developments, NDiaye actually brings the novel to a surprisingly ‘happy’ conclusion.

One of the novel’s most striking features is that the question of exactly why people are hostile to Nadia and Ange is never resolved and left to the reader's views.

An obvious interpretation is ethnicity and racial prejudice, but that is never stayed explicitly.

And the novel also hints that Nadia may be being metaphorically punished for her own failings, in particular her own shunning of others (her parents & siblings, a hometown friend, her ex-husband, her son's ex-lover, granddaughter and other outside her family, Noget - all of whom converge at the novel's end) and, in particular, not for her ethnicity but rather for her denial of her own origins.

A crucial moment comes when she realises that those like her and Ange shunned by society are like us not so much physically as in the depths of their self-centered souls.

Highly recommended.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

This was my third book by Marie NDiaye and it has furthered my conflicted feelings toward her writing. There is much I liked about this novel. The heavy sense of unease is masterfully sustained throughout. The casual straying into horror kept my attention, as did the vague menace manifested through various characters. Likewise did I appreciate the refusal of NDiaye to offer easy answers or resolutions to the compelling issues she raises. But the narrator Nadia irked me to no end. Though I could see where she was coming from, she exhibited no redeeming qualities that might win me over to her side. And with first-person perspective I need something to connect with in the person telling the story. With Nadia I could find no way in, which just meant that all of her hand-wringing only served to further alienate her from me as a reader. Sadly, this alienation negated much of what otherwise could have drawn me in to the narrative. I find myself incapable of deciding on a rating for this one, but it has not deterred me from continuing my investigation into NDiaye's unique fictional milieu. I may yet find the one book that makes all the difference.

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third Ndiaye book; it won't be my last, although two in a row was intense. It is an unpleasant book; the narrator has no sympathizers, and presents herself in the most unflattering light unapologetically; the grotesque holds the field at all times, but grotesque within the quotidian, grotesque in the normal course of things. Ndiaye is clearly writing literary fiction, but this is a horror story as surely as Self Portrait in Green and That Time of Year are. The dream-logic at work in her fiction is oppressive and cruel. Through the midway point of the book I found myself only capable of reading short stretches at a time. And then I surrendered, even as the action of the plot grew more and more bizarre; I reached the point of acceptance. I am not sure what Ndiaye "means"; often I feel, reading, that there much be some allegory I'm missing (as in the character of Souhar, the narrator's granddaughter, whose name said narrator despises without explanation). But by the end of this book my main reaction was one of immersion, accepting the story on its terms as one does with a horror movie that's removed all my defenses. High recommendation, if you can stand feeling uneasy the entire time.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes me want to be a better person. Or else.

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nadia and her second husband, Ange, are elementary school teachers. They are neatly appointed people in a neatly appointed flat in a neatly appointed provincial town. So far they’ve been able to harness this community’s narrow-minded social forces to build a smug little life for themselves. But now something has happened. Suddenly those tacit social forces have turned against them. Without doing anything at all to provoke it, Nadia and her husband have become objects of contempt and loathing.

Nothing to provoke it, Nadia? Are you so sure? No, she’s not sure at all. Out of nowhere Ange develops this terrible, suppurating wound beneath his button-down shirt that seems to suggest something’s been festering beneath the surface of their life all along. All their neatly appointed neighbor-friends have abandoned them and the one neighbor they always despised and felt so superior to, who looks like a hobo—Noget—insinuates himself into their marriage and their flat, to care for Ange and force his rich home-cooked food on Nadia. Soon the buttons are popping off her cardigan. Or maybe he’s somehow impregnated her. Or maybe it’s menopause. Oh, she doesn’t want to know. But she will know. An odious truth is coming for her.

I prefer exaggeration to flat-out fabulism. Jung identifies disproportion as a sure sign that you’re in the presence of the unconscious: disproportionate affects, exaggerated impulses, intentions that go too far. A nameless anxiety can press a person into a very odd shape. It can do the same to a book. Here, the protagonist doesn’t know what she herself is up to from one scene to the next; the other characters have become grotesque in their persecution of her; and even the setting has come alive with streetcars that pounce at her and paths that give her the brush-off. The whole world is pregnant with the portent of nothing good.

This was my second time reading this amazing thumbscrew of a book. You’ve heard of 50- or 100-year floods? This, for me, is a 10-year book. I started to wonder if I’d ever find a book to fill me up the way so many books did when I was a younger, hungrier reader. Well (burp) let me loosen my belt a little.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harrowing and claustrophobic initially but always compelling, My Heart Hemmed In is Marie NDiaye at her brilliant best. This is her newest published work in English (just released) but was published in France in 2007 while Ladivine came out in English just last year but was published in France in 2013. The two novels make fascinating companion pieces, treating the same theme (denial of one's roots, race, class--one's self--and all that this entails) in equally compelling ways. My Heart Hemmed in is the more allegorical, fabulistic of the two and is more concentrated than the discursive Ladivine but both have that element, and I love how animals--dogs in particular--figure in.
To my mind NDiaye is one of the most interesting novelists working today. A consummate prose stylist (one has to also credit her translators; Jordan Stump is the most recent of these)--I will read anything that she writes. Other works of hers not to miss: Three Strong Women (3 novellas); Self-Portrait in Green (autobiography); Rosie Carpe (novel); All My Friends (short fiction).

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only read Ndiaye's short fiction before. The narrative voice—tightly controlled, proud, paranoid and delusional—carries this tale of a middle-aged couple suddenly struck by unexplained, frightening circumstances. Dark, surreal and disturbing. For my full review see: https://roughghosts.com/2017/07/12/pr...

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing book, very different from Ladivine. A sort of allegory where what's being allegorized could be many different things. It's powerful enough that it's not just an allegory though, there's something universal in here, primal. What impressed me most was how realistic the emotional world of each character was, even while the manifestations of that in the book's physical world were often surreal and strange. And because we are reading from Nadia's perspective, we don't figure out many of these character's motivations until later. Much is hidden from us that slowly gets revealed. And as it's revealed, the world that is portrayed becomes much more relatable, even understandable along some strange logic.

[Ana Nehan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn, Nadia.

What. A. Trip.

I had to come back and change my rating from 4 to 5 stars because the more I think about this book, the more I realize how downright amazing it really is.

[Adrienne L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange tale of middle-aged married teachers, Ange and Nadia, whose comfortable lives in Bordeaux, France are upended as they've become objects of disgust, ridicule and outright hostility from their neighbors, colleagues, students and family. After Ange suffers an unnamed "accident" while in the classroom, the couple finds themselves under the forced care of their neighbor Noget, who they had always felt themselves superior to and repulsed by, but who now insinuates himself into their lives over the wife's protests as her husband lays bedridden with a festering wound.

As the story progresses, the reader starts to get hints at why the couple is so despised. Told through Nadia's perspective, you learn more and more about her true character as she faces a reckoning with events and people from her past. Her failings and digressions and cruelties eventually leave the reader feeling towards Nadia a disgust like that felt by her neighbors, and which so baffles her in the beginning of the story. But as Nadia slowly faces her true nature, her world tumbles into a paranoid nightmare, almost like a dark, surrealist take on A Christmas Carol.

This is a hallucinatory, anxiety provoking tale with some minor horror elements. The middle of the book dragged quite a bit as Nadia spends an interminable amount of time stumbling through the streets of Bordeaux which have become unfamiliar, sinister and changeable. My Heart Hemmed In is a short novel, but it seemed overlong to me and would have been better suited to a short story or novella. I can't say that I didn't appreciate the book or find it fascinating in some ways, but I found myself eager to reach the end about halfway through.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I have far more to say about this and I need to think more too - and no time for that. Once I forced myself to read through my discomfort (and I have some complicated ideas about what made this so uncomfortable to me, especially in the first half) I'm glad to have read it. As I noted before, Ndiaye's books always remind me of that quote about literature being made to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (or something like that.) She does a good job of doing that, and that makes her books far from "comfort reads" or easy reading, while ensuring that nobody can just skim quickly through the pages. It's interesting and there is loads to say about it, but someone else will have to do that, or come do my job while I sit and think about literature - anyone up for a trade? I'm on call all the way through January 2!

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5

This work's a weird mix between Oyeyemi and Jelinek, the former's customary theme of twisted fairy tails growing more pronounced over time as the latter's style of claustrophobic social critique (more, in NDiaye's case, internalized first person than overarching omniscience) running all the way through. I began to put together a picture of Bourdieu and cultural capital all wrapped up in a psychological horror that I imagine many would term Kafkaesque but rings of something far more overt to me: borderline Lovecraft, but from the point of view of someone that that past writer targeted with metaphors of dehumanization and destruction. However, for whatever reason, this work didn't carry me as strongly as most of those name dropped authors usually do (I've never read Lovecraft), and, unlike Three Strong Women, this was not as pleasurable stretch of my reading muscles and left more with a sense of...I can see what this is likely building to, but so what? Ultimately, an interesting way to explore an interesting conceit, but the balance of rise and climax and fall dragged too much through what really can't be called a long book, and so whatever thoughts I developed bloomed less like hard won flora and more like black mold in a long forgotten basement. So, not a pleasantly soft read, but not quite fibrous enough for me, leastwise in an acute sense, to sufficiently reward the forging through.

This book can be seen to be about the inevitable side effect of fake it till you make it ism, or, a sort of reverse Disney Princess scenario, where winning one's desire (typically in the form of a person) is what ultimately births the curse. Every character here is either rather nasty or rather forgettable, but, honestly, if you're the type who reads for such, I'd question what you're doing in NDiaye's corner of the world in the first place. I get that she won the Prix Goncourt, but unless one is prepared for exploring the depths of misery that often accompanies middle class efforts to avoid becoming human sacrifices (in the case of Heart Hemmed in, disinheriting one's very own birthright in order to better do what one's told) in well crafted yet borderline intrusive prose, one's not going to get very far. I am rather disappointed that I didn't like this as much as TSW, but that might be partly due to my incessant need to satisfyingly come to an intricate conclusion when it comes to these sorts of works. If one's in the mood to getting a front row seat to the toll society exacts on anyone who strives to rise above their 'place' and doesn't remain a saint in the process, plus some vague intimations at witches and the like, here's your book. Unfortunately for me, I probably missed one too many references and/or rhythms of prose, especially of the fairy tale sort, that I just didn't catch until it was too late to indulge in it to the extent I would need to to come out of this with a more positive opinion.

This was chosen for the 100 Best Women in Translation list, so I'm sure it's going to get attention in the right circles (and mayhaps even in some of the wrong) outside of mine. As such, I don't mind so much that it wasn't my favorite, especially since, in the right hands, it would result in some very interesting papers. I have one other NDiaye work that I've been looking for for some time: indeed, it was my continued inability to acquire a copy of that that inspired my acquiring of this when the opportunity arose. All in all, if someone is used to reading long term bouts of malaise that slowly but surely probe the wounds of social realities, they're going to find more of the same here with added tests of psychological horror/magical realism, whichever term floats your boat. In essence, don't come to this work looking for an easy read. There's very real stakes involved in the world of the haves and the have nots, and however facetious the struggles nearer the top may be, loathing yet loving yet hating yet yearning for both what is on high and what is on low, what is gained comes at the price of the myriad faces being stamped on with a boot.

But are they, like me, also thinking: I want nothing to do with all that?

[Book Riot Community]

There’s no point in trying to summarize a Marie NDiaye book, whether we’re talking about the short story collections of the novels. There’s always layers of meaning and plot that initially seem disconnected but which come together at the end in ways both interesting and surprising. My Heart Hemmed In is superficially about a middle-aged French woman forced into revisiting her past after her husband is attacked. But it’s also about race, class, society and navigating Western culture as an immigrant and person of color. It’s about choices and mistakes and realizing what is important. NDiaye’s style of storytelling reminds me of authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Simenon and Wolfgang Hilbig – challenging “literary” writers who don’t necessarily make it easy for their readers but are rewarding nonetheless.

— Tara Cheesman


from The Best Books We Read In June 2017: https://bookriot.com/2017/07/03/riot-...

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, but also punishing. NDiaye is amazing at creating an atmosphere of intense anxiety and shame. My Heart Hemmed In tackles a lot of the same things as Ladivine, but in a much more opaque and surreal way. Imagine Kafka's Trial, redone by a female Michael Haneke -- it's sort of like that.

[WndyJW · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nadia and Ange are married teachers, proud of their profession and their private, insular life, so when Nadia discovers that Ange has been terribly wounded and left with putrefying hole in his abdomen Nadia is set on a journey to discover what it is about them, about her, at the root of the disdain in which they are held by colleagues, neighbors, former friends and even family, and why does everyone keep asking Nadia if she is pregnant?
Marie NDiaye and translator Jordan Stump brilliantly maintain the sense of unease and mystery throughout this page turner while Nadia is forced to confront the truth about actions.

Marie NDiaye is an author everyone should be reading and I strongly recommend this book.

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felt like the first half really drew me in and then I lost some of that compelling feeling toward the end as Ndiaye seemed to be making a more visible effort to wrap things up in a way that made a bit of sense. I preferred the early stages of the nightmare where this seemingly utterly blameless and virtuous couple suddenly find both their human and physical surroundings turn inexplicably hostile. Reminded me in a more sinister way of Ishiguro’s the Unconsoled which is one of my all time favorite books. Then it got into sort of Rosemary’s Baby territory and I lost a bit of my enthusiasm. But Ndiaye is fantastic at creating an eery atmosphere where her characters have lost control of sinister, malignant forces in league against them. The utterly abhorrent character of writer/pedagogue of some fame, Noget, who the main character Nadia has never heard of and her ignorance where everyone else is in awe of his renown because she doesn’t watch tv is morbidly funny. Her lack of respect and deference toward him seems to be somehow worthy of the worst punishment and torment with his creepy constant presence. It’s like Harry Dean Stanton deciding to move in and throw parties at your house because you didn’t recognize him. Hilarious and horrifying.

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading My Heart Hemmed In was not only a worthwhile experience in itself, but one that also enriched my understanding of other books by NDiaye. She writes about race and ethnicity in a way that is both delicate and brutal. I find her books require some perseverance but they reward and haunt the patient reader.

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost Inexplicable Until You Have the Key
Review of the Two Lines Press paperback edition (2017) of the English translation of the French language original Mon cœur à l'étroit (2007)

I feel quite positive about this book after feeling miserable about it for the first half. I was floundering in the paranoia and despair and not seeing any relief in sight except for the sometimes comical food scenes with the neighbour. Then I had a breakthrough which allowed me to appreciate the book from a proper perspective and understanding.

I had started it thinking it was something like Dorothy Hughes' The Expendable Man which starts with a similar aura of paranoia which you can't understand but which then has a gut-punch reveal about 100 pages in. Ndiaye lets it all seep into you gradually without any sudden reveals. I felt the lack of an introduction to a 2017 translation of a 2007 book and thought that some added context and information would have helped. That meant that I had to research it myself. I fixated on the Wikipedia sourced information that NDiaye left France in protest after Sarkozy's election in 2007. I started imagining the husband Ange as a sickly France being nursed to death by the neighbour Noget (as a stand-in for Sarkozy) while Nadia (a stand-in for NDiaye, note the similarity of the names) plans to leave him behind.

When I chanced upon the "Souhar" reveal (through the translator's hidden Q&A spoiler on GR, the exact sort of information that would have been helpful in an Introduction) it helped me to get oriented properly (this is what I mean by The Key in the lede above) and Nadia's paranoia (and the manifestation growing in her belly) all became much clearer as it being due to her disavowal of her origins and heritage. She (and Ange) became well (or at least relatively well) after she had reconciled herself to her past.

This was my first NDiaye, and it was a difficult read but ultimately an interesting one which did end on a positive note. I'm definitely intrigued to read her further as her style appears to be quite unique and challenging.

I read My Heart Hemmed In as the December 2019 Group Read at the 100 Best Women in Translation Group on Goodreads.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

For one month out of every year, I attempt to read only authors I have not previously read. One of the biggest surprises this month as been French novelist Marie NDiaye, whose novel My Heart Hemmed In [Mon coeur à l’étroit] I have just finished reading. Unlike many postmodern writers, who do not shy away from boring their readers to tears, NDiaye carries out a relentless examination of the life of her heroine, a teacher who, along with her husband, suddenly finds herself roundly hated by most of her acquaintances. Nadia has distanced herself from her ex-husband, her son, and her parents. She has gained weight, and several of the people she meets assume that she is pregnant.

The story begins when her husband Ange returns from the class he has been teaching with a serious stomach wound. A neighbor shows up who is known to everyone she meets as an educator and television personality, but whom she does not know as both she and Ange do not even own a TV, being disconnected from their popular culture. NDiaye follows Nadia closely as she begins to try to reconnect with her past and try to come to terms with the pain she feels. The process is a wonderfully told voyage of self-discovery that transforms her.

I have always felt that the best novels involve a radical transformation of the main character. What NDiaye has done is make this voyage exciting rather than the usual banal. I can see myself reading more of her works in the months to come, most recent of which is La Cheffe, which is on my TBR pile.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bonne nouvelle pour les détracteurs de NDiaye : ici, pas de phrases à rallonge, pas d'excès de jolis mots désuets. Tout est claire, net, et sans fioritures de style. Ca, c'est pour la forme ; côté fond, soyez prêts à rester dans le brouillard (tout comme Nadia, l'héroïne de l'histoire) pour au moins les trois quarts du roman ! On évolue comme dans le labyrinthe illogique d'un mauvais rêve ; on ne sait point où l'on va, les passages sont sombres, et les sorties se mutent en impasses. Ce n'est pas tout à fait un cauchemar, il y a sur le chemin quelques vagues clairières, pour ne pas dire des oasis. Comme Nadia, on est poussé par la curiosité (un peu morbide, certes) plutôt que par la terreur. On a envie que ça se dévoile, quitte à découvrir une réalité laide.

Quelques passages :
Je m'accroupis près du lit. Je commence à découper la chemise d'Ange tout autour de la plaie. J'entends mon propre souffle, accéléré, difficile. Malgré le mouchoir, l'odeur infecte me donne le vertige. Je trempe une compresse dans le désinfectant puis j'essaie d'éponger le pus abondant qui a débordé sur le ventre d'Ange, sous son pantalon, qui a trempé le matelas et les draps. J'ai l'impression que ce que j'enlève se trouve aussitôt renouvelé, jaillissant lentement du fond de la plaie.

Je fouette l'air de mes deux mains. Une sueur particulièrement acide, odorante, coule sur mes tempes, bien que l'air soit frais dans le bureau de poste, et je remarque que Noget et le guichetier me dévisagent avec un air de prudente hésitation.

Le tram glisse près de moi dans une stridulation moqueuse. Les trois visages de mes semblables, tous groupés au fond de la rame comme les fleurs d'un bouquet tragique, d'une gerbe triste et sombre vouée au piétinement, ces trois visages me regardent avec une expression de désolation, de pitié – pauvre femme, contrainte de marcher, et si grosse, si empêtrée, toute rouge de froid et de fatigue !

Suintements en tous genres et corpulence honteuse – ça me va ! Et c'est juste un petit échantillon ; il y a bien d'autres images qui s'alignent comme tant de tableaux (viandeux) de F. Bacon, ou de prises de vue des films, (disons, par exemple, Eraserhead ) de D. Lynch.

Pas pour tout le monde, mais une lecture singulière et assez fascinante.

[Kathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

“... I feel like the only one around here who hasn’t figured out what it is that’s so terribly momentous! Oh, but I’m not going to spend all my time begging forgiveness for everything I’m evidently somehow doing wrong.”

Like the protagonist, I just want to know what all this means, but the book revels in its murkiness and taunts. I’m abandoning this at 40%, just under 100 pages in. My heart hemmed in, my eyes glazed over, my threshold for tedium exceeded long, long ago ...

“What are you trying to prove?” I say, in deep trepidation.

“Don’t be so supercilious,” Gladys tells me.

This is a fine translation. I’m impressed by Jordan Stump’s vocabulary and control of the style and atmosphere. The story isn’t working for me, though. It’s reminded me of Kafka’s The Castle since the first pages, a book I disliked intensely. My reading experience with this book is too close to the disorienting and nightmare experience of the protagonist, Nadia, and I want out. It’s distressing, it’s inscrutable, more than anything it’s scornfully and derisively mocking.

I don’t know how one can like the premise, the characters, and the psychological insights as much as I do and then turn around and say this book is profoundly boring, but that’s how I feel. Reading it is making me miserable. I can’t pinpoint just what it is that isn’t working for me. I care about these characters, I’m curious about what will happen next ... the mood just inspires a terrible sense of vertigo.

“When you don’t know what you’re talking about, you keep your mouth shut,” I whisper fiercely. “These things you’re telling me don’t make any sense. What am I supposed to do with this nonsense?”

If I’m going to compare this to Kafka, on paper it should be more reminiscent of The Trial (the characters have been accused and condemned by their community for something apparently self-evident that no one will clue them in on) or The Metamorphosis (seemingly overnight, Nadia and her husband, Ange, begin to represent something hideous, inspiring intense repugnance), both of which I liked. But, no, for me it’s The Castle all over again, a book I forced myself to finish for nothing, it turned out.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers who follow my reviews know that I don't mind wandering lost for a while in a novel. This is the third novel I've read by French author Marie NDiaye. She never fails to challenge me while drawing me in to her world of people who are themselves challenged by race, origin or social status in a European setting where they don't fit.

Nadia and Ange are dedicated school teachers who have risen from humble beginnings to a tenuous French middle-class life in Bordeaux. They are childless and consider themselves better than their fellow teachers. A growing awareness that they are despised in their community culminates in a physical attack on Ange.

While Ange refuses any medical care, malingering near death in his bed, Nadia fights for her identity. She roams the city, trying to understand how they have fallen so short of what they desired.

Through allegorical haunting and psychological suffering, Nadia revisits her first husband, the estranged son of that marriage, and finally the parents she rejected long ago. Eventually she gains clarity.

One of the things I recognize in NDiaye's novels is that the lives of lower-class immigrants in France are only a parallel of the immigrant experience in America. Often these are people who come from countries once colonized by the French. Like any immigrant they come to France seeking a better life but must suffer from a loss of family and traditions, amounting to a loss of identity.

Her writing is powerful, rich and disturbing. She paints the confusion and displacement of her characters in the tones of nightmare with echos of their origins. Whenever I read her, I am made aware of the suffering we all experience as human beings trying to achieve connection in a world where differences are often stronger than similarities.

Marie NDiaye is the daughter of a French mother and a Senegalese father, raised near Paris. She published her first novel at seventeen. She won the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for her third novel, Three Strong Women, which I have read. That novel landed her on the Man Booker International Prize 2016 finalists list. Her 2013 novel, Ladivine has also been translated into English and is perhaps my favorite of the three I have read.

[Jodell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this book in chunks of about 5-10 pages at a time. It took me a full 24 hours to get through it. The first half I tried to figure out wtf was going on. The second half I just wanted to stab myself in the eye but I trudged along. I didn't like anyone in this book at all. I hated them all and I'm still dazed and confused. Seriously it was totally the type of book that is off the wall in a way that I could not understand or comprehend or begin to like. And I like weird books.
1. Everyone hates Nadia
2. So she's an evil bitch I know bitches yet most I like anyway despite
3. There's a weird guy who feeds Nadia and her husband lots of food
4. Her husband is sick wounded and dying/supposedly because of Nadia
5. The only way for him to get better is for Nadia to leave so but no one wants her
6. She was not always a good person, she hurt alot of people unwittingly and intentionally
7. She gets fat with a disease inside her I think its all her evil into a devil baby
8. Even her son hates her/yet he gets a live in lover just like her
9. she finally visits her parents after 35 years and lives with them and her granddaughter
10. everyone kind of gets better maybe sort of as well as they can
11. most of its a mystery I am not allowed to be in on
12. Why couldn't anyone just speak up and say whatever so Nadia could get it? oh, and me to
13, I sometimes have to have spelled out to me slowly when story is being told in a vague way
14, Either the book failed me or I failed the book either way onto the next.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

we're convinced of our innocence, but ashamed all the same.

perhaps even more haunting and unsettling than her previous novel, the mesmerizing ladivine , marie ndiaye's my heart hemmed in (mon cœur à l'étroit) is the arresting, distressing tale of nadia, her husband, and two lives unwinding out of control. the french/senegalese writer crafts a paranoid, perturbing milieu that infuses every sentence of her story with an inescapable, yet ill-defined foreboding. with my heart hemmed in, the prix goncourt winner further establishes her well-deserved reputation as an innovative, extraordinary talent. her prose, her characters, her pacing, her psychological intuition, everything about an ndiaye novel delights (if not disturbs). what more could it possibly take for stateside audiences to recognize the breadth and brilliance of this gifted writer?!

we finish our meal in silence, each aware of the fear gnawing at the other but neither daring to speak of it openly, because we're both used to peace and serenity, an untroubled understanding of everything around us, and so, in a way, our own fear offends us, like something unseemly and out of place.

*translated from the french by jordan stump (modiano, chevillard, volodine, de balzac, simon, toussaint, et al.)

**4.5 stars

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stupid. So stupid. For so many reasons.
I don't know if the poor writing was actually the writing or the translation, but a lot of sentences I had to keep rereading because they made no sense.
This book was modern art in book form. You don't get it Julie, that pile of trash represents the filth that surrounds us all but will eventua--Stop lying, its trash. I get it. I am a deeply profound reader. I don't necessarily need to comprehend the details of a story to greatly enjoy and appreciate it. I love Lovecraft. I love Vandermeer. But when the central plot to your story is the main character evolving and culminates into a Disney fairytale ending, the main character should be PORTRAYED as evolving. None of the characters learned anything. Also, a dark novel should NEVER have a Disney fairytale ending. Did I mention this book was stupid?!
/Rant

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to appreciate this book. I understand that she had to revisit some of her actions and attitudes of the past but instead of clearing things up in the last chapter, it left me more confused. The meat eater storyline, the outcome of the husband relationship, what was the issue of her grandchild's name?

[Huy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuốn sách thứ 3 của Marie NDiaye mà mình đọc và vẫn rất thích cách viết của bà, đây là một cuốn sách rất đặc biệt bởi từ đầu đến cuối câu chuyện được bao phủ trong một màn sương mù mờ mịt mà đến tận cuối tôi cũng không biết chắc sự thật là gì và điều gì đã xảy ra, cách viết hấp dẫn, giàu kịch tính mà vẫn mơ màng khiến ta đắm chìm trong một nỗi bất an kỳ lạ đến những dòng chữ cuối cùng.

[Keven Girard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Puissant, dérangeant, portant à réflexion sur les jugements et le regard des autres, heureux mélange d'étrangeté et de douce poésie.

[Candy VanderPump · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everyone hates you. Like, everyone. What’s the common denominator? You.