Three powerful women
These three stories have not really a narrative link, and the fates of the three main characters that do intersect in a very stealthy. What unites them is the writer's exploration of the inner consciousness of characters in direct contact with a hostile world, their way to tame it, to understand consciousness and progressive, painful, their interiority. In the first story, Norah, a young lawyer who lives in Paris, returns to Africa (the place is not specified) to see his father, former businessman loses. As in Rosie Carpe , reports progeny are described under the angle of monstrosity: the father is a lecherous old bastard, who abandons Norah and her sister and fled to Africa, taking their brother, condemning them to a tragic fate. By finding Norah regains a piece of her past that she tries to forget and which reappears to swallow in a hallucinatory reality. Gradually, all the markers it was built to collapse in contact with the father at the corrosive power, presence and animal vampire. In the second story, the protagonist and the narrative voice is a man, contrary to what the title announces the novel. This is Rudy Descas, poor seller in a kitchen design company, married to the beautiful Fanta he forced her to come with him to France after a tragic episode in their lives in Senegal. The time of narration only lasts a few hours, during which Rudy reviewing all the episodes of his life and gradually becomes aware of his mistakes. The last story of the novel, that of Khady Demba, is poignant and has the distinct style of the novelist at his apogee. Khadim is a simple woman, very uneducated, who lives on a level with his conscience and emotions, as in a mist shrouded interior that prevents fully understand the reality. A series of circumstances beyond its control takes him on a mare that aims illegal immigration. Here again the character will gradually become conscious of itself, and despite the horror of the fate of Khadim, his only and ultimate triumph is to have forged a clear conscience, safe, and his valiant inwardness and uniqueness of human being.
In these three stories, there is no real action, there is rather an expansion of the narrative, contrasted by the dizzying whirl of thought, which causes the character in flashbacks and hallucinations and immobilized in a kind of stasis inside.
The litany of names
In Three powerful women , as in Rosie Carpe , proper names of characters, repeated to themselves in their consciousness dazed and risen from the depths of a torpor atavistic, seem the only bodies capable of anchoring the characters themselves and a monstrous reality, nightmarish moving. Norah, Rudy Descas, Khady Demba, among the inner turmoil they experience, often say to themselves: I'm Norah, Rudy Descas, Khady Demba. The last part of the novel is largely symptomatic of the centrality of the proper name in both the narrative structure and style of Marie Ndiaye: it is often a careful exploration of consciousness with a reality which changes always a nightmare. In this confrontation between individual conscience and character of this reality full of traps, bloated characters and hallucinated hallucinating, charged a very high coefficient of strangeness, is the proper name as the anchor of the character itself, the extent of its existence, the metronome of his presence. The floating of these existential characters who have in reality is unlikely that an anchor on the bottom of this belief inside, this tireless persistence to repeat itself the singularity of their own name, which is the condensation of their being, came entirely take refuge in their consciousness.
Marie Ndiaye's style reflects this perception of the characters, surrounded by a strange world that seeks to sluggish thinking decipher but which always escapes their understanding. His catchy prose, coats the characters in the meanders of a long sentence, stretched, serpentine, as if to establish the hegemony of the words that fly inside their head as if to show their congealing inside a spacetime particular good. But the turning of a clash with reality now that the sentence is sharp, as for rolling these torpid consciences and awaken to new perceptions. The prose is as dizzying as the dive into the abyss that is the thought, especially when it is cut the world.
Bestiary and fantasy
The novels of Mary Ndyaie are always interspersed with moments of fantasy, as if reality escaped from the pores of the story and was carried away in moments of drift, skid, to fantastic vistas. Suddenly, in a reality that has become unbearable in a cruel world, at once sordid and absurd, appear fantastic moments of madness that embody the inner character. Often, these abuses are carried by the fantastic appearance of animals, very evident in his prose as both a metaphor and become archaic as an attempt to inner transformation of the characters. It is within the novels as Ndyaie inside a dream, painted by a surrealist painter. We think much to Surrealism by reading this writer, since Surrealism was expressed more than any other paint ambivalences of reality through the distorted minds of beings. These surreal moments sometimes arise in a very unexpected and strange, as if we were in direct contact with the inner madness of a character and with moments of magic, mythology: for example, the emergence of a nozzle on the windshield of the car Descas Rudy, who is in the middle of the campaign in the doldrums and inside c ' is the father of Norah who turns the night into a bird refuge in the flamboyant ...
It is no coincidence that the writer chose birds as omens of a strange, disturbing, even terrifying, the manner of a Hitchcock: only survival of a presence even in the urban wild, they are the embodiments of this nature raptor, this constant struggle for survival and existence that the characters also live at their level. With their eyes still and tellers, their sharp beaks, their mobility fulminant, they are there to make the characters face to face with a world both terrible and elusive.
Rosie Carpe
In one of the novels Ndyaie Rosie Carpe is a young woman born in Brive la Gaillarde, parents petty bourgeois mediocre and who has kept his childhood memories and distant yellow the family home and the only thing that glorious childhood drab and dull: a white magnolia in the garden. His childhood was not prepared to Rosie Carpe's descent into hell as an adult, when she left her little corner of the province with her brother Lazarus and goes to Paris. Soon the two are separate to each go to a lousy destiny. Rosie Carpe began working in a hotel in the Paris suburbs sad and uniformly gray, with Antony, and then several events and meetings will seal his fate forever, and ordered to drift. What is beautiful in writing Ndaiye, is that it comes to alternate distance and empathy, in turn, clinical and emotional, it also makes it perfectly inside the delirium of character through small realistic ratings in its environment, on acts of daily life. She understand the inner turmoil made it even more noticeable by a simple glance at the window of this bedroom suburb of banal, she felt discomfort in a conversation through the obsessive repetition of an innocuous little phrase, yet chilling. Something in the character of Rosie Carpe is both pathetic and unsympathetic: his passivity, his lack of foresight in relation to others, his stupor in a cruel world and without any amenities for the frail and flighty little thing it is. The author take his character in this distance between the inner uncertainty in relation to itself and adhesion intermittent pain and despair of being hit themselves, parachuted into the outer shell of a body given the world. At the same time, there is not an ounce of pathos in style, not an ounce of letting go. It is a remarkable performance, there are pages breathtaking, haunting prose and boring at once: his prose is both Flaubert and Julian Green, the former because Ndaiye wraps his character in a kind of prose whirling, dizzying, in long sentences that seem to offer endless support to a spurious character disorientation, the second because Ndaiye knows beautifully put a tormented human consciousness, moving in a setting and environment still outside, indifferent, and the contrast between the two is poignant. She knows how to impose this rift between stasis desperate things ecstatic and can not be.
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