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The Cheffe: A Cook's Novel
From the Booker Prize-nominated author of Three Strong Women: an elegant, hypnotic new novel about a legendary French female chef--the facts her life, the nearly ineffable qualities of her cooking, and the obsessive, sometimes destructive desire for purity of taste and experience that shaped her life.
Longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award
Continuing her tradition of writing provocative fiction about fascinating women, here Marie NDiaye gives us the story of a Great Female Chef--a chef who was celebrated as one of the best in a world where men dominate, and the way that her pursuit of love, pleasure, and gustatory delights helped shape her life and career. Told from the perspective of her former assistant (and unrequited lover), now an aged chef himself, here is the story of a woman's quest to the front of the kitchen--and the extraordinary journey she takes along the way.
Longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award
Continuing her tradition of writing provocative fiction about fascinating women, here Marie NDiaye gives us the story of a Great Female Chef--a chef who was celebrated as one of the best in a world where men dominate, and the way that her pursuit of love, pleasure, and gustatory delights helped shape her life and career. Told from the perspective of her former assistant (and unrequited lover), now an aged chef himself, here is the story of a woman's quest to the front of the kitchen--and the extraordinary journey she takes along the way.
305 pages, Paperback
First published October 3, 2016
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2368 people want to read
About the author
Marie NDiaye
56 books399 followersMarie 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 108 reviews
October 19, 2020
This is a book that has been patiently waiting on the to-read shelf for several months, and it is a bit of a slow burner - for much of the first half the story of the titular cheffe (the translator Jordan Stump chose to retain this French neologism for a female chef, a word that has no simple English equivalent) seems to lack interest.
We follow the career of the Cheffe through the somewhat hagiographical account of our unnamed narrator, a younger male former employee and admirer who is now living in semi-retirement. Most of the first half concerns her career as a domestic servant and later cook for the Clapeaus, a couple of gourmands whose tastes she educates. After having a daughter through a relationship the narrator can only guess at, she gets a job in a restaurant kitchen in Bordeaux which she eventually leaves to start her own restaurant. Most of the human interest in the story is provided by her difficult relationship with her daughter, and the relationships of both with the narrator.
The Cheffe is only named very late in the book, for reasons that are deliberately held back to keep the reader guessing about the full nature of the narrator's interest - I guessed what this would be fairly early.
Overall I quite enjoyed this, but I have yet to find a book by Ndiaye that I can praise unreservedly.
We follow the career of the Cheffe through the somewhat hagiographical account of our unnamed narrator, a younger male former employee and admirer who is now living in semi-retirement. Most of the first half concerns her career as a domestic servant and later cook for the Clapeaus, a couple of gourmands whose tastes she educates. After having a daughter through a relationship the narrator can only guess at, she gets a job in a restaurant kitchen in Bordeaux which she eventually leaves to start her own restaurant. Most of the human interest in the story is provided by her difficult relationship with her daughter, and the relationships of both with the narrator.
The Cheffe is only named very late in the book, for reasons that are deliberately held back to keep the reader guessing about the full nature of the narrator's interest - I guessed what this would be fairly early.
Overall I quite enjoyed this, but I have yet to find a book by Ndiaye that I can praise unreservedly.
October 15, 2020
Now winner of the American Literary Translators Association National Translation Awards
"She thought there was something excessive in the praise people had begun to heap on her cooking.
She found the phrasing of those panegyrics ridiculous and affected, it was a question of style.
She had no taste for preciousness or grandiloquence, and no respect.
She knew all about the force of the senses, after all it was her work to awaken them, and she was always enchanted to see that force show on the diners’ faces, she strove for nothing else, day in and day out, for so many years, virtually without rest.
But the words people used to describe it struck her as indecent.
Elle trouvait excessives les louanges dont on s’est mis à couvrir sa cuisine.
Elle trouvait riducules et affectées les tournures de ces éloges, c’est une question de style.
Nulle, part elle n'appréciait ni ne respectait l'emphase, le grand genre.
Elle comprenait les sensations puisqu’elle s’appliquait à les faire naître, n’est-ce pas, et que leur manifestation sur la figure des convives l’enchantait, c’est tout de même bien ce à quoi elle s'évertuait jour après jour, depuis tant d’années, presque sans repos.
Mais les mots pour décrire tout cela lui paraissaient indécents."
The Cheffe: A Culinary Novel is translated by Jordan Stump from Marie NDiaye's La Cheffe, roman d'une cuisinière, and published as part of Machelose Press's excellent new international library of literature in translation.
It is a rather different novel to the two previous translation of Ndiaye's work I have read, and a hard novel to judge, since it is a victim of its own, cleverly constructed, form.
The novel is ostensibly a verbal biography of a French female chef, known in the book simply as The Cheffe, who rose from simple origins to found one of the most celebrated restaurants's in Bordeaux, receiving a Michelin star. Hers is a story that emphasises the virtues of creationary vision allied with deliberate practice combined with a single-minded, almost obsessive, focus on perfection.
But the form in which the story is told is perhaps as important as the story itself. It is narrated, to an unnamed (and to the reader unheard) interlocutor, perhaps a ghostwriter or journalist, by one of her former sous-chefs, twenty years her junior, who himself was to go on to become a well-known chef, but who now lives anonymously, in retirement, in a boozy French expat community in Lloret en Mer.
"We also love Lloret de Mar’s short winters, even if we pretend to long for the summer , the sunbaked terraces, the gold-tinged sunlit pool, and our constant high-spirited inebriation, we’re more sober in the winter at Lloret de Mar, we go for drives in the unremarkable housestrewn countryside, we take Spanish lessons, we reconvene the book club we’d abandoned in the sunny season."
And indeed there is a, at first seemingly unrelated side story, interspersed with his reminiscences about the Cheffe, as he frets about the approaching visit of his own daughter.
The difficulty with the novel comes because in many respects his tale - which is the book we are reading - contains many of the most heinous faults of bad biography. It is hagiographic; invests minor events with retrospective significance and describes them in exhaustive (for the reader, at times exhausting) detail; highly subjective and often rather speculative; written in opposition to another account which the reader is supposed to have read but likely hasn't - here that of the Cheffe's daughter; and, above all, that form of biography, most commonly seen in obituaries, which is as much about the writer as the subject, or rather the writer’s claim to a privileged relationship to the subject.
The Cheffe and his special relationship:
"The Cheffe was fantastically intelligent. How I loved to see her delight in being taken for a simpleminded woman! Our sly, shared awareness of her vast intelligence felt like a bond between us, a bond that I cherished and that she didn’t mind, a bond I wasn’t the only one to feel, since there were others, longstanding acquaintances, who knew just how sharp she was, how perceptive, and who also sensed she wanted to keep that a secret from strangers and meddlers, but I was the youngest, I didn’t know her before, back when she cared less about secrecy, I was the youngest, and the most in love with her, of that I’m sure."
The speculative nature of his account of the Cheffe's origins:
"The things I know about the Cheffe, the things I’m telling you now, aren’t things she revealed to me, they’re things I think I’ve realised on my own."
The daughter and her account:
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. I hate her, I have no qualms about saying so, I hate her and I have contempt for her, she never deserved to be the Cheffe’s daughter."
Which makes for an odd mix - a almost deliberately uncomfortable read. Indeed, when talking about the Cheffe, he falls into the same trap of ridiculous and affected panegyrics that she so despised (see the opening quote) when critics and customers praised her cuisine.
The plot of her life itself is actually, these flourishes aside, rather straightforward, although Ndiaye does successfully bring together the two plot strands, and it is interesting to see how the Cheffe's downfall begins when she starts to attract celebrities, displacing her longstanding loyal clientele, despite her low prices and no-booking policy:
"Yes, those were the years when La Bonne Heure became a haunt for all Bordeaux’s V.I.P.s. There was no question it was happening, but the Cheffe was slow to face it, not because she had some grudge against the upper classes (she never forgot what she owed the Clapeaus), but because she didn’t want to see that even if she didn’t take reservations and kept her prices within reach of any budget the chic, well-heeled crowd was driving away everyone who wasn’t like them, not that they wanted that or dreamt it was happening, but simply by the inertial force of their authority, of their innate right, of everything that was exclusive and closed about them, everything cliquish and disdainful, the Cheffe knew it, yes, but she was slow to face it."
Overall, it is a worthwhile novel but, as a reading experience, a victim of its own form. 3.5 stars rounded down to 3 as I would strongly recommend Ladivine and My Heart Hemmed In as starting points for Ndiaye before this.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
"She thought there was something excessive in the praise people had begun to heap on her cooking.
She found the phrasing of those panegyrics ridiculous and affected, it was a question of style.
She had no taste for preciousness or grandiloquence, and no respect.
She knew all about the force of the senses, after all it was her work to awaken them, and she was always enchanted to see that force show on the diners’ faces, she strove for nothing else, day in and day out, for so many years, virtually without rest.
But the words people used to describe it struck her as indecent.
Elle trouvait excessives les louanges dont on s’est mis à couvrir sa cuisine.
Elle trouvait riducules et affectées les tournures de ces éloges, c’est une question de style.
Nulle, part elle n'appréciait ni ne respectait l'emphase, le grand genre.
Elle comprenait les sensations puisqu’elle s’appliquait à les faire naître, n’est-ce pas, et que leur manifestation sur la figure des convives l’enchantait, c’est tout de même bien ce à quoi elle s'évertuait jour après jour, depuis tant d’années, presque sans repos.
Mais les mots pour décrire tout cela lui paraissaient indécents."
The Cheffe: A Culinary Novel is translated by Jordan Stump from Marie NDiaye's La Cheffe, roman d'une cuisinière, and published as part of Machelose Press's excellent new international library of literature in translation.
It is a rather different novel to the two previous translation of Ndiaye's work I have read, and a hard novel to judge, since it is a victim of its own, cleverly constructed, form.
The novel is ostensibly a verbal biography of a French female chef, known in the book simply as The Cheffe, who rose from simple origins to found one of the most celebrated restaurants's in Bordeaux, receiving a Michelin star. Hers is a story that emphasises the virtues of creationary vision allied with deliberate practice combined with a single-minded, almost obsessive, focus on perfection.
But the form in which the story is told is perhaps as important as the story itself. It is narrated, to an unnamed (and to the reader unheard) interlocutor, perhaps a ghostwriter or journalist, by one of her former sous-chefs, twenty years her junior, who himself was to go on to become a well-known chef, but who now lives anonymously, in retirement, in a boozy French expat community in Lloret en Mer.
"We also love Lloret de Mar’s short winters, even if we pretend to long for the summer , the sunbaked terraces, the gold-tinged sunlit pool, and our constant high-spirited inebriation, we’re more sober in the winter at Lloret de Mar, we go for drives in the unremarkable housestrewn countryside, we take Spanish lessons, we reconvene the book club we’d abandoned in the sunny season."
And indeed there is a, at first seemingly unrelated side story, interspersed with his reminiscences about the Cheffe, as he frets about the approaching visit of his own daughter.
The difficulty with the novel comes because in many respects his tale - which is the book we are reading - contains many of the most heinous faults of bad biography. It is hagiographic; invests minor events with retrospective significance and describes them in exhaustive (for the reader, at times exhausting) detail; highly subjective and often rather speculative; written in opposition to another account which the reader is supposed to have read but likely hasn't - here that of the Cheffe's daughter; and, above all, that form of biography, most commonly seen in obituaries, which is as much about the writer as the subject, or rather the writer’s claim to a privileged relationship to the subject.
The Cheffe and his special relationship:
"The Cheffe was fantastically intelligent. How I loved to see her delight in being taken for a simpleminded woman! Our sly, shared awareness of her vast intelligence felt like a bond between us, a bond that I cherished and that she didn’t mind, a bond I wasn’t the only one to feel, since there were others, longstanding acquaintances, who knew just how sharp she was, how perceptive, and who also sensed she wanted to keep that a secret from strangers and meddlers, but I was the youngest, I didn’t know her before, back when she cared less about secrecy, I was the youngest, and the most in love with her, of that I’m sure."
The speculative nature of his account of the Cheffe's origins:
"The things I know about the Cheffe, the things I’m telling you now, aren’t things she revealed to me, they’re things I think I’ve realised on my own."
The daughter and her account:
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. I hate her, I have no qualms about saying so, I hate her and I have contempt for her, she never deserved to be the Cheffe’s daughter."
Which makes for an odd mix - a almost deliberately uncomfortable read. Indeed, when talking about the Cheffe, he falls into the same trap of ridiculous and affected panegyrics that she so despised (see the opening quote) when critics and customers praised her cuisine.
The plot of her life itself is actually, these flourishes aside, rather straightforward, although Ndiaye does successfully bring together the two plot strands, and it is interesting to see how the Cheffe's downfall begins when she starts to attract celebrities, displacing her longstanding loyal clientele, despite her low prices and no-booking policy:
"Yes, those were the years when La Bonne Heure became a haunt for all Bordeaux’s V.I.P.s. There was no question it was happening, but the Cheffe was slow to face it, not because she had some grudge against the upper classes (she never forgot what she owed the Clapeaus), but because she didn’t want to see that even if she didn’t take reservations and kept her prices within reach of any budget the chic, well-heeled crowd was driving away everyone who wasn’t like them, not that they wanted that or dreamt it was happening, but simply by the inertial force of their authority, of their innate right, of everything that was exclusive and closed about them, everything cliquish and disdainful, the Cheffe knew it, yes, but she was slow to face it."
Overall, it is a worthwhile novel but, as a reading experience, a victim of its own form. 3.5 stars rounded down to 3 as I would strongly recommend Ladivine and My Heart Hemmed In as starting points for Ndiaye before this.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
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December 7, 2019A demonstration.
The story told.
A young woman possessed by the gracious spirits of the kitchen: during her life, she moves further and further away from the showy, complex, highly constructed - or even the de- and re-constructed - kind of dish that is meant to impress with its artistry, hide its origins, further and further towards a pared back sobriety and rigour. So pared back indeed that the constituent elements are still walking round the farmyard. Yes, that extreme.
The telling.
In an exact parallel, the narrator, a commis chef in the woman's kitchen, and deeply enamoured of her, starts with a showy, complex narrative, one that is disconcerting in its constant self-reference and breaking of the fourth wall. An artifice. Showy, meant to impress? The style becomes more and more stripped back, sober (literally) and rigorous, and far more believable for that.
A book about an artist of the kitchen that shows us how art works.
The story told.
A young woman possessed by the gracious spirits of the kitchen: during her life, she moves further and further away from the showy, complex, highly constructed - or even the de- and re-constructed - kind of dish that is meant to impress with its artistry, hide its origins, further and further towards a pared back sobriety and rigour. So pared back indeed that the constituent elements are still walking round the farmyard. Yes, that extreme.
The telling.
In an exact parallel, the narrator, a commis chef in the woman's kitchen, and deeply enamoured of her, starts with a showy, complex narrative, one that is disconcerting in its constant self-reference and breaking of the fourth wall. An artifice. Showy, meant to impress? The style becomes more and more stripped back, sober (literally) and rigorous, and far more believable for that.
A book about an artist of the kitchen that shows us how art works.
January 2, 2019
Finally finished that book I started over a year ago.
Well written although the long sentences and absence of dialogues make the reading heavy. Also, the story is so monotonous that I was bored. I kept reading hoping something was going to happen but nothing happened. I am glad it is over.
Well written although the long sentences and absence of dialogues make the reading heavy. Also, the story is so monotonous that I was bored. I kept reading hoping something was going to happen but nothing happened. I am glad it is over.
December 27, 2018
4-/5. Biography of rockstar chef told by (probably) unreliable narrator, that seems at once to invite interpretation and throw author-is-dead-ian scoff at it. NDiaye writes beautifully, and it leaves me hungry for every single dish in it, I'm just not entirely sure what to make of it.
July 27, 2024
Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe (translated beautifully by Jordan Stump) is billed as “a chef’s novel” but it is not a typical novel. Some of the people who read this book and rated it on Goodreads didn’t like it because it didn’t follow the typical genre rules. These readers found the book boring. That wasn’t my experience at all. Once I got the hang of The Cheffe I found a lot of things that I love in fiction: a very unreliable narrator, writing about food, and a thorough psychological portrait of a contradictory chef...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
December 1, 2019
I loved this book. There is so much in it that someone better than me should write a good review. Terrific idea of showing an interesting woman through the eyes of an unrequited love/assistant. Yet another book for my wish-to-own list. I would definitely read this again.
July 24, 2022
A careful character study filtered through the narrator's almost religious obsession.
June 19, 2018
J'ai entendu parler de ce roman dans la presse, et cela faisait un moment qu'il était dans ma PAL. Une déclaration à la fin de ma lecture ? OUF ! Enfin terminé.
Je me suis forcée à le finir, parce qu'il ne faisait pas tant de pages que cela.
Ni le style, ni l'histoire ne m'ont plu.
Les phrases tellement longues qu'à la fin on ne sait plus à qui ou à quoi cela s'applique. Les mots pompeux. Le style ampoulé. L'histoire répétitive au possible, dans laquelle il ne se passe trop rien, et de la façon dont cela est raconté, on a l'impression qu'il se passe encore moins de choses.
On aura compris à la fin de la lecture que le narrateur admire, aime, adore, idolâtre la Cheffe, alors que la fille de celle-ci est inintéressante, lourde, grossière, pas belle, bête, etc, etc, etc.
Le portrait fait de la Cheffe et de sa carrière n'est, pour moi, pas convaincant ni trop trop crédible. Je ne me suis pas du tout attachée aux personnages.
Clairement, Marie NDiaye, ce n'est pas pour moi, et je ne retenterai pas l'aventure.
Je me suis forcée à le finir, parce qu'il ne faisait pas tant de pages que cela.
Ni le style, ni l'histoire ne m'ont plu.
Les phrases tellement longues qu'à la fin on ne sait plus à qui ou à quoi cela s'applique. Les mots pompeux. Le style ampoulé. L'histoire répétitive au possible, dans laquelle il ne se passe trop rien, et de la façon dont cela est raconté, on a l'impression qu'il se passe encore moins de choses.
On aura compris à la fin de la lecture que le narrateur admire, aime, adore, idolâtre la Cheffe, alors que la fille de celle-ci est inintéressante, lourde, grossière, pas belle, bête, etc, etc, etc.
Le portrait fait de la Cheffe et de sa carrière n'est, pour moi, pas convaincant ni trop trop crédible. Je ne me suis pas du tout attachée aux personnages.
Clairement, Marie NDiaye, ce n'est pas pour moi, et je ne retenterai pas l'aventure.
February 18, 2020
I did find this a really long read and wanted to give up at times, but happy I kept reading due to the ending. This is also a book translated in French and I would have enjoyed reading it in French. The translation though was done well and you get the sense of how intricate and detailed the writing is, such a beautifully written book. It's a love story but not like the ones you are used to and you need to make inferences because not everything is clear. Overall, if you appreciate the love someone has for their craft and an unusual love story, you might enjoy this book. I would give it 3.5 if that was an option.
March 9, 2020
Was it because it was translated from the French, or was it simply the writing style? I can't decide...but I was utterly disappointed by this novel. I read about ten pages, and thought I must be missing something, or that maybe it was a baffling prologue, but I continued a bit farther. Then I tried leafing through the book to see if there was anything that grabbed me. Sadly, the answer is no.
The book is written from the point of view of a long-time would-be lover of a renowned French female chef. It read as cold and impersonal, yet fawning. Very odd.
There are far too many compelling books out there on which I would rather spend my time. This one is going right back to the library.
The book is written from the point of view of a long-time would-be lover of a renowned French female chef. It read as cold and impersonal, yet fawning. Very odd.
There are far too many compelling books out there on which I would rather spend my time. This one is going right back to the library.
June 16, 2020
really loved this book & its craft. marie ndiaye doesn't miss.
December 9, 2019
I really enjoyed this absorbing account of the rise and fall of a woman chef, who comes from humble beginnings but whose innate culinary skill takes her to the top of her profession. The unnamed narrator, who once worked for her, has his own story to tell and it is the slow, measured way in which the details of their lives are revealed that I found so compelling. It’s a story of obsession, the Cheffe’s with her cooking and the narrator’s with the Cheffe and their personal and professional struggles, their triumphs and their failures are movingly described. We’re never quite sure to what extent the narrator is unreliable which adds to the elusiveness and ultimate unknowability of the Cheffe who remains enigmatic throughout. I don’t think it’s wise to give too much of the plot away, as it’s a slow-burn of a novel and the accumulation of narrative detail over many pages was for me its great strength. An original, clever and beautifully written novel and one which I heartily recommend.
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December 4, 2020The novel petered out towards the end for me, with a whimper instead of a bang. The whole time it felt as though there was some incredible shocking revelation coming, but it...didn't? It's a story of narration, in many ways like intruding on someone's thoughts, rather than their diary. Also: don't be afraid of adding as many translator's notes as you need. As a tale of obsession and fixation, the food is sort of beside the point.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2019
I received this as a Goodreads giveaway. I'm sorry - I wanted to like it more than I did - but it was difficult to read and follow. Yes, the prose was nice and N'Diaye does have a beautiful sense of writing, but it was still a little too cumbersome for my taste.
August 21, 2020
Marie NDiaye's The Cheffe: A Cook's Novel is a fascinating book about a woman who finds happiness in the creative act of cooking. Despite the book's subtitle, however, the work "cook" is never used to describe the Cheffe. She remains simply the Cheffe until the very end of the book, where we learn her real name.
We do not learn the name of the book's narrator, who loves and looks up to the Cheffe, despite the fact that she is much older than he is. He even marries the Cheffe's daughter -- surely one of the most unattractive characters in all of modern literature -- though they divorce later on.
There are few descriptions of happiness that can compete with the Cheffe suddenly being appointed a temporary cook for the Clapeau family. It takes fully forty or fifty pages of her assuming at the age of sixteen the role of a brilliant chef.
Marie NDiaye, who is half French and half Senegalese, is to my mind one of the luminaries of world fiction. Can her Nobel Prize for Literature be far behind?
We do not learn the name of the book's narrator, who loves and looks up to the Cheffe, despite the fact that she is much older than he is. He even marries the Cheffe's daughter -- surely one of the most unattractive characters in all of modern literature -- though they divorce later on.
There are few descriptions of happiness that can compete with the Cheffe suddenly being appointed a temporary cook for the Clapeau family. It takes fully forty or fifty pages of her assuming at the age of sixteen the role of a brilliant chef.
Marie NDiaye, who is half French and half Senegalese, is to my mind one of the luminaries of world fiction. Can her Nobel Prize for Literature be far behind?
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March 30, 2023DNF
August 10, 2025
‘…what she’d do in all the days to come, and all the years, thinking with almost painful euphoria that a lifetime wouldn't be enough to create the infinitely varied, enigmatic, fertile cuisine she had in her mind, and there were so many ingredients she didn't yet know, and her swarming thoughts invented beautiful, abstract images of finished structures that she wanted her cooking to resemble, she felt that but didn't understand what it meant, it was too soon, she had too little life and experience behind her to pin it all down, she thought about it endlessly but still it was too soon, and she hated being so young, such a novice, she had no reason to fear but she feared it would be too soon forever.’
I took way too long to finish this book. It put me in a drowsy state most of the time but I still wanted to finish it because like climbing a mountain, there are some scenes along the way that make the trek feel a little more worth it.
The narrator was impassioned to a fault. He could describe the feelings of a moment from his POV, the cheffe’s POV, the family the chef worked for..the richness of it got unpalatable.
I took way too long to finish this book. It put me in a drowsy state most of the time but I still wanted to finish it because like climbing a mountain, there are some scenes along the way that make the trek feel a little more worth it.
The narrator was impassioned to a fault. He could describe the feelings of a moment from his POV, the cheffe’s POV, the family the chef worked for..the richness of it got unpalatable.
August 17, 2021
I understand the divisiveness about this book on here. It's an idiosyncratic read--an unbroken monologue of the narrator being interviewed about the eponymous Cheffe. He's a good interview--wide-ranging, honest, a bit self-important, and deeply jealous of the attention paid to the object of his fascination and affection. It's an interesting idea, a biography of an important chef that never was. Questions raised include: What makes an artist? What responsibilities does an artist have to those who consume the art? Who gets to tell a story if the person the story is about doesn't have any interest in telling it? It's a far cry from That Time of Year, which had much more of a feeling of a fable. This is interested in contemporary concerns. Every time I thought I wouldn't finish it, it kept being compelling. I would recommend it if this didn't put you off entirely.
May 29, 2019
Afin de terminer la lecture de ce livre, je me suis mise dans la peau d'un commis en plein apprentissage au sein d'une brigade d'un restaurant étoilé. Je tournais les pages comme on apprend à tourner les pommes de terre, avec la sûreté du geste acquis à force de labeur et de répétitions, la sensation du travail accompli, mais toujours perfectible. Je regardais les phrases comme de longues tagliatelles au jus de viande rôtie, avec une reconnaissance infinie pour la beauté des mots employés, mais avec un assaisonnement qui me laissait une amertume en bouche et suscitait chez moi un début d'ecoeurement. Peu à peu, je me rendais à l'évidence : j'étais devenue végétarienne à mesure que les plats s'égrenaient devant mes yeux. Je ne souhaitais enfin qu'une seule chose, que la Cheffe avait mis tant d'années à perfectionner: la simplicité d'un artichaut tourné, avec son cœur tendre et doux qui fondait sur la langue, présenté dans une assiette blanche dépourvue de fioritures.
Vint le moment du dessert où je me suis dit que je m'étais trompée, que je ne n'avais pas su déguster les mots à leur juste valeur et qu'il me fallait ouvrir des papilles neuves afin d'accueillir cette douceur avec bienveillance, lui rendre justice. L'employé de service ne m'a pas apporté l'éclair au café que j'attendais avec impatience et indulgence, admirant les efforts déployés par la Cheffe pour le sublimer...
La note est un peu salée, même si je reconnais qu'il a fallu une grande discipline de la part de l'autrice pour que chaque jour elle retrouve son rythme d'écriture afin de nous livrer le portrait d'une Cheffe en quête d'amour et qui reste cependant encore à la fin, nimbé de mystère.
Vint le moment du dessert où je me suis dit que je m'étais trompée, que je ne n'avais pas su déguster les mots à leur juste valeur et qu'il me fallait ouvrir des papilles neuves afin d'accueillir cette douceur avec bienveillance, lui rendre justice. L'employé de service ne m'a pas apporté l'éclair au café que j'attendais avec impatience et indulgence, admirant les efforts déployés par la Cheffe pour le sublimer...
La note est un peu salée, même si je reconnais qu'il a fallu une grande discipline de la part de l'autrice pour que chaque jour elle retrouve son rythme d'écriture afin de nous livrer le portrait d'une Cheffe en quête d'amour et qui reste cependant encore à la fin, nimbé de mystère.
December 22, 2020
Marie NDaiye has written a daringly creative book--one without chapters. As I read it, I realized how attached I am to reading a book with chapters, but it didn't keep me from reading her novel from start to finish. Don't be deterred, but this is one long monologue by the Cheffe's assistant. He intersperses the Cheffe's story with his heartfelt observations, conclusions, and deep desire to be her lover. As I was reading, I would find myself in the midst of his rendition of her story only to be deftly pulled into his feelings as he explained how just or unjust a situation was. After awhile he (really NDaiye) would lead me back into the story. I kept wanting to know what happened next but also to understand the psychological workings of the narrator. This is not just your everyday novel; it's a work of art.
October 22, 2022
Sefa . Un roman culinar - Marie Ndiayne
4⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
Desi nu are nicio actiune aceasta carte m-a făcut tot mai curioasa cu fiecare pagina citita.
Mi-ar fi plăcut totuși sa citesc și povestea Șefei din perspectiva ei pentru a putea înțelege mai bine latura psihologica a romanului.
Fostul ajutor de bucatar al Sefei si omul ce a urmarit-o pe tot parcursul evoluției sale este cel de la care aflam cum o femeie care provenea dintr-o familie foarte saraca ajunge sa devina una dintre cele mai mari experte in gastronomie .
Asa cum ziceam a fost o lectura ce nu a adus ceva wow, insa modul în care a fost scris , relatarea povestii, investigațiile făcute de narator asupra vieții Sefei , modul ei de a fi si de a se comporta mi-au atras destul de mult atenția.
4⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
Desi nu are nicio actiune aceasta carte m-a făcut tot mai curioasa cu fiecare pagina citita.
Mi-ar fi plăcut totuși sa citesc și povestea Șefei din perspectiva ei pentru a putea înțelege mai bine latura psihologica a romanului.
Fostul ajutor de bucatar al Sefei si omul ce a urmarit-o pe tot parcursul evoluției sale este cel de la care aflam cum o femeie care provenea dintr-o familie foarte saraca ajunge sa devina una dintre cele mai mari experte in gastronomie .
Asa cum ziceam a fost o lectura ce nu a adus ceva wow, insa modul în care a fost scris , relatarea povestii, investigațiile făcute de narator asupra vieții Sefei , modul ei de a fi si de a se comporta mi-au atras destul de mult atenția.
February 13, 2024
J'ai lu ce roman en même temps que je regardais la série The Bear. Je ne suis pas cheffe étoilée, mais je trouve que ça a été un mariage de génie de ma part.
La Cheffe raconte l'histoire de ce mystérieux personnage sans nom, la Cheffe, vue par son second qui, très clairement, est amoureux d'elle. Bien sûr, c'est un biographe biaisé, mais il transmet un calme dans sa façon de raconter la plupart des épisodes marquants de cette vie qui fait que l'on ne doute jamais de sa véracité. On dirait un moine qui écrit la vie d'une sainte.
Une vie exceptionnelle truffée de hasards. Être au bon endroit au bon moment, etc.
Une vie d'une femme qui a trouvé sa raison d'être et s'y est vouée avec passion.
La Cheffe raconte l'histoire de ce mystérieux personnage sans nom, la Cheffe, vue par son second qui, très clairement, est amoureux d'elle. Bien sûr, c'est un biographe biaisé, mais il transmet un calme dans sa façon de raconter la plupart des épisodes marquants de cette vie qui fait que l'on ne doute jamais de sa véracité. On dirait un moine qui écrit la vie d'une sainte.
Une vie exceptionnelle truffée de hasards. Être au bon endroit au bon moment, etc.
Une vie d'une femme qui a trouvé sa raison d'être et s'y est vouée avec passion.
December 18, 2017
Ein schönes Cover, eine mir von Drei starke Frauen positiv in Erinnerung gebliebene Autorin - gerne habe ich zu diesem Buch gegriffen. Umso enttäuschter war ich, dass sich die Erzählung in langen, gewundenen Sätzen dahinzog ohne wirklich viel Greifbares herzugeben.
Meine Rezension für den Borromäusverein steht hier:
http://www.borromaeusverein.de/medien...
Meine Rezension für den Borromäusverein steht hier:
http://www.borromaeusverein.de/medien...
August 19, 2018
Un roman pour lequel il m'a fallu un certain temps avant de m'habituer au style de l'auteure, déconcertant au premier abord, avec des phrases très longues, une ponctuation parfois surprenante. Une fois que l'on s'y habitue, le roman de lit plutôt bien, les personnages sont attachants, mais il manque quelque chose... Pour les passionnés de cuisine, comme moi, peut être qu'il manque quelque chose dans les descriptions des recettes, des plats. On les imagine, mais sans aller jusqu'à en sentir les parfums. Une lecture sympathique donc, mais sans passion pour ma part !
February 11, 2020
a narrator with the bias of unrequited love, or maybe sublimed love, gradually comes to terms with how he can live with having loved. i thought, most of the way through, that the heavy foreshadowing would lead to a heavy, deadened ending. but i was wrong about what the ending would be, and how it would feel.
November 26, 2025
A peculiar book--a study of obsession, both that of the titular character, born into agricultural misery to indigent but 'carefree' parents in Sainte-Bazeille, in the sud-ouest, and that of the narrator. Unreliable, duplicitous, damaged, mirroring in his biography many features of la Cheffe's, this man is twenty years younger, and also of shadowy provenance (without a name), drawn to her restaurant, with its dark blue walls and blue emanation, from his teens. He loves her, becomes her best friend but is thwarted, however circuitous his route, in any attempt to be closer to her than that. NDiaye's story in its true light is elusive, even evasive: does the cheffe neglect her daughter, a less talented woman who looks like her, and who only tries to ingratiate herself, impress her mother, or is her daughter a monster of destructiveness and ingratitude? Is the cheffe a great, instinctive cook, an example of end-directed self-abnegation, or does the Michelin star that sinks her, that changes the fortunes of her first restaurant, a measure of her limited (and, by the narrator, endless blown-up) abilities? The narration is exhaustingly, alienatingly hyperbolic. I thought this was first the fault of the author, then the translation, before understanding it was strategic--possibly pig-headed, but uncompromising and highly intelligent. The novel defies cheap expectations on almost every score and is calculatedly stiff, demanding.
The cheffe is rigorous about food, only taking pure ingredients and doing hardly anything to them. In the end, the narrator thinks, she comes to hate 'cuisine'. She regains her Michelin star. Her concession to sugar and fripperies is minimal, wanting, instead of dessert, to serve green olive sorbet or aubergines simmered in honey. At the end of the meal she makes, aged sixteen and with a premonition of her future, greatness and utter single-mindedness, to impress her first employers, the haut-bourgeois Clapeaus, she declines to put butter in the pastry for a peach tart, flavouring it with verbena and encasing it only in water and flour. They are relieved not to be oppressed by her genius and their need of it. This dish reappears on her restaurant menu. The Clapeaus, though they constantly praise meat, its benefits for health, are ashamed of their dependence on food, which is excessive, illegitimately sensual, demeaning, hypocritically dissimulated and locked into knotty, deflected psychodynamics with whoever is cooking for them. They live in the Landes in a barren pine forest. The cheffe has to leave them when she becomes pregnant, probably by the gardener, at the age of around nineteen. The child is deposited back at her parents while the cheffe seeks kitchen experience in Bordeaux. (No sexual or romantic relationship, even the narrator's marriage to a woman with whom he is merely superficially larky and sardonic, is anything like as important in the novel as food). Apparently the daughter dominates her mother in her makeshift flat, but would not be allowed to interfere with the restaurant in the era of its finding regulars and building up a reputation. On the ebb and flow of this relationship, particularly, the narrator, who has retired to an old person's colony in the sun and given up cooking, is not to be trusted. The novel ends with a restitution of sorts, with the arrival of a daughter the narrator has not brought up, barely even known--who does not seem to want answers or a relationship from him. There are several, crammed-in late revelations, but nothing finally clarifying or rectifying.
The cheffe is rigorous about food, only taking pure ingredients and doing hardly anything to them. In the end, the narrator thinks, she comes to hate 'cuisine'. She regains her Michelin star. Her concession to sugar and fripperies is minimal, wanting, instead of dessert, to serve green olive sorbet or aubergines simmered in honey. At the end of the meal she makes, aged sixteen and with a premonition of her future, greatness and utter single-mindedness, to impress her first employers, the haut-bourgeois Clapeaus, she declines to put butter in the pastry for a peach tart, flavouring it with verbena and encasing it only in water and flour. They are relieved not to be oppressed by her genius and their need of it. This dish reappears on her restaurant menu. The Clapeaus, though they constantly praise meat, its benefits for health, are ashamed of their dependence on food, which is excessive, illegitimately sensual, demeaning, hypocritically dissimulated and locked into knotty, deflected psychodynamics with whoever is cooking for them. They live in the Landes in a barren pine forest. The cheffe has to leave them when she becomes pregnant, probably by the gardener, at the age of around nineteen. The child is deposited back at her parents while the cheffe seeks kitchen experience in Bordeaux. (No sexual or romantic relationship, even the narrator's marriage to a woman with whom he is merely superficially larky and sardonic, is anything like as important in the novel as food). Apparently the daughter dominates her mother in her makeshift flat, but would not be allowed to interfere with the restaurant in the era of its finding regulars and building up a reputation. On the ebb and flow of this relationship, particularly, the narrator, who has retired to an old person's colony in the sun and given up cooking, is not to be trusted. The novel ends with a restitution of sorts, with the arrival of a daughter the narrator has not brought up, barely even known--who does not seem to want answers or a relationship from him. There are several, crammed-in late revelations, but nothing finally clarifying or rectifying.
July 26, 2024
An extended character portrait of a cheffe, told from the perspective of her former male employee, who has nursed a lifelong love-obsession with her, and is now living as an almost-elderly man "in exile" from Bordeaux. He no longer cooks. No one in his circle of exiles knows anything about him. The Cheffe is a mysterious, indifferent, utterly uncategorizable woman. She takes praise and criticism with equal amounts of apathy. In a word, she is nonplussed. The narrator spends the book describing the Cheffe's life story (happy childhood, cooking stint for the wealthy Klapos at 16, one restaurant job, Le Bonheur, her daughter, her success/the star, the ending/unravelling of it all) and her unique personality traits.
As the book goes on, the narrator's "suspicious melodramatic imagination" becomes more and more pronounced. Like most of NDiaye's narrators, he is unreliable: "I myself make plain honesty my watchword" (HA).
He has a strange relationship in particular with the Cheffe's daughter. It seems that he is jealous that the daughter has the Cheffe's attention, is able to access a certain level of intimacy with her that he (the narrator) is never able to attain. He warns the reader/audience (the "you" he sporadically addresses) not to be "hoodwinked" by the Cheffe's daughter, by her account of the Cheffe's life. He writes that, when her daughter was born, some of the "Cook" seeped out of the Cheffe; she was no longer as driven as before. There is a sense of impending tragedy when, after Le Bonheur receives its first star, the daughter returns from Canada to be with her mother, taking over elements of the restaurant from a business angle, even though, as the narrator says, "having her daughter far away was a comfort to the Cheffe".
The narrator also has a daughter-Cora. He is not close with Cora, and similarly thinks of her as "my young elephant in a faraway land." Even so, the saddest time in his life was when his ex-wife left him with Cora, and he no longer had his job working for the Cheffe. Over time, he became addicted to pills, to alcohol, and his current, very eerie, self-imposed "exile" and erasure of his cooking past among the "eternally tan faces" of his fellow exiles (exiles with "hearts gone cold") is a lovely complement to the obsessive retelling of the Cheffe's life, of her (and his) glory days. He explains his own lack of fame/exemplary success as a cook with his Cheffe-obsession: "That's why I could never become a great cook; I was perpetually bedeviled by love, desire, and illusions."
Another thing common to NDiaye's work that I wish wasn't there: the sense that eating itself is a form of "gluttony," that being thin is somehow better than being fat. Yes, a significant amount of fatphobia comes through here. I wish it was not so.
Amazing quotations: "They [the peaches in a simple, austere tart] glistened as they were set down on the table, as polished and glazed as gravestone ornaments".
As the book goes on, the narrator's "suspicious melodramatic imagination" becomes more and more pronounced. Like most of NDiaye's narrators, he is unreliable: "I myself make plain honesty my watchword" (HA).
He has a strange relationship in particular with the Cheffe's daughter. It seems that he is jealous that the daughter has the Cheffe's attention, is able to access a certain level of intimacy with her that he (the narrator) is never able to attain. He warns the reader/audience (the "you" he sporadically addresses) not to be "hoodwinked" by the Cheffe's daughter, by her account of the Cheffe's life. He writes that, when her daughter was born, some of the "Cook" seeped out of the Cheffe; she was no longer as driven as before. There is a sense of impending tragedy when, after Le Bonheur receives its first star, the daughter returns from Canada to be with her mother, taking over elements of the restaurant from a business angle, even though, as the narrator says, "having her daughter far away was a comfort to the Cheffe".
The narrator also has a daughter-Cora. He is not close with Cora, and similarly thinks of her as "my young elephant in a faraway land." Even so, the saddest time in his life was when his ex-wife left him with Cora, and he no longer had his job working for the Cheffe. Over time, he became addicted to pills, to alcohol, and his current, very eerie, self-imposed "exile" and erasure of his cooking past among the "eternally tan faces" of his fellow exiles (exiles with "hearts gone cold") is a lovely complement to the obsessive retelling of the Cheffe's life, of her (and his) glory days. He explains his own lack of fame/exemplary success as a cook with his Cheffe-obsession: "That's why I could never become a great cook; I was perpetually bedeviled by love, desire, and illusions."
Another thing common to NDiaye's work that I wish wasn't there: the sense that eating itself is a form of "gluttony," that being thin is somehow better than being fat. Yes, a significant amount of fatphobia comes through here. I wish it was not so.
Amazing quotations: "They [the peaches in a simple, austere tart] glistened as they were set down on the table, as polished and glazed as gravestone ornaments".
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 10, 2024
came across this on the shelf while i was browsing my library and snatched it up because i didn’t realize it existed!
we have an unreliable narrator, in the depths of alcoholism and depression, telling someone (a reporter or journalist? there are occasional addresses to another person but it doesn’t feel like the reader is being addressed specifically) about the life and rise to culinary fame of the woman he loves - a virtuosic female chef (referred to as “the cheffe” throughout the book). we learn bits and pieces of the narrator’s life, but his main quality is his unrequited love and reverence for the cheffe. he is a perfect example of the impossibility of knowing everything about someone you love. he claims to have been her closest friend, yet still says “the things I know about the cheffe, the things I'm telling you now, aren't things she revealed to me, they're things I think I've realized on my own.” we see him struggling to untangle her motivations and the secrets she kept from him, and the toll that took on him. since the book isn’t told from the cheffe’s point of view, we have no way of knowing what is true and what the narrator is projecting onto her.
a lot of my enjoyment of this book came from reading the cooking as a metaphor for writing, or creativity in general. i wouldn’t categorize this book as food writing - the focus is not necessarily on the dishes the cheffe makes, but rather how she felt while she was creating. so many passages reminded me of the way writers talk about how writing makes them feel: cooking made her feel “happy for reasons that came only from herself, her endurance, her boldness, her faith in her abilities, and not because someone else… was trying to make her happy, which she never trusted… she wanted to owe the emotion and sensation of happiness to herself alone…”
the cheffe’s love of cooking is all consuming. even when she’s not in the kitchen, she is tirelessly thinking about her next creation. while experimenting in the kitchen, she enjoys an immense solitude and focus that almost reminded me of a room of one’s own by virginia woolf - it is the one room where she is able to do her life’s work and let her creativity flourish. she also demonstrates an immense respect for the ingredients she works with and the process she goes through to transform them that is reminiscent of the high regard in which writers hold the works that have inspired them and their craft.
this was a bit different from her other works that i’ve read so far, but still a really enjoyable read from ndiaye. it’s less unsettling than some of her other works, but it has dense prose, with lots of commas and clauses that weave together. this made it a bit slow going but wasn’t too big of a deal the further i got into the book. as always, can’t wait to pick up another book from her!
we have an unreliable narrator, in the depths of alcoholism and depression, telling someone (a reporter or journalist? there are occasional addresses to another person but it doesn’t feel like the reader is being addressed specifically) about the life and rise to culinary fame of the woman he loves - a virtuosic female chef (referred to as “the cheffe” throughout the book). we learn bits and pieces of the narrator’s life, but his main quality is his unrequited love and reverence for the cheffe. he is a perfect example of the impossibility of knowing everything about someone you love. he claims to have been her closest friend, yet still says “the things I know about the cheffe, the things I'm telling you now, aren't things she revealed to me, they're things I think I've realized on my own.” we see him struggling to untangle her motivations and the secrets she kept from him, and the toll that took on him. since the book isn’t told from the cheffe’s point of view, we have no way of knowing what is true and what the narrator is projecting onto her.
a lot of my enjoyment of this book came from reading the cooking as a metaphor for writing, or creativity in general. i wouldn’t categorize this book as food writing - the focus is not necessarily on the dishes the cheffe makes, but rather how she felt while she was creating. so many passages reminded me of the way writers talk about how writing makes them feel: cooking made her feel “happy for reasons that came only from herself, her endurance, her boldness, her faith in her abilities, and not because someone else… was trying to make her happy, which she never trusted… she wanted to owe the emotion and sensation of happiness to herself alone…”
the cheffe’s love of cooking is all consuming. even when she’s not in the kitchen, she is tirelessly thinking about her next creation. while experimenting in the kitchen, she enjoys an immense solitude and focus that almost reminded me of a room of one’s own by virginia woolf - it is the one room where she is able to do her life’s work and let her creativity flourish. she also demonstrates an immense respect for the ingredients she works with and the process she goes through to transform them that is reminiscent of the high regard in which writers hold the works that have inspired them and their craft.
this was a bit different from her other works that i’ve read so far, but still a really enjoyable read from ndiaye. it’s less unsettling than some of her other works, but it has dense prose, with lots of commas and clauses that weave together. this made it a bit slow going but wasn’t too big of a deal the further i got into the book. as always, can’t wait to pick up another book from her!
March 5, 2025
I didn’t love this as much as I’ve loved Marie NDiaye’s other books. As always, NDiaye has a gift for isolating emotions from their contexts and for giving them their own textures. There are a lot of those moments here--like the Cheffe’s decision not to go back to Sainte-Bazeille or the Clapeaus’ obsession with food--in which a person feels something a little bit perverse, something a little at odds with the situation provoking the feeling, and that means that the feeling has a substance of its own and that it feels almost alien, invasive. I like that! I also like that this book picks up on the images from My Heart Hemmed In of a person exercising corrupt power through cooking extremely indulgent food, and moves in the opposite direction: the Cheffe’s austerity and her deeply virtuous refusal of power and worldly status. It’s very interesting that NDiaye sets those ideas in the world of excellent cuisine. The austerity isn’t about refusing sensuous pleasure or denying the body, but about approaching it in the right way, with the right reverence--with meat standing both literally and figuratively for the sacrifices made for pleasure. All of this is very abstract, which is part of what makes the book potent. The narrator’s hatred of the Cheffe’s daughter is powerful because it’s not really justified (although I do think NDiaye makes a compelling argument about marketing majors being evil), because there’s no way to rationalize anyone’s behavior or analyze what they are really feeling, because it’s not psychological--because the feelings are simply physical facts, touchable. But I didn’t like the ending. The importance of Cora turned out to be a little too psychologically explainable, and things came together in a contrived way, which is something I absolutely could not say about any other Marie NDiaye book I’ve read.
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