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    Three Strong Women
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    Three Strong Women
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    Three Strong Women
    Ebook300 pages4 hours

    Three Strong Women

    By Marie NDiaye and John Fletcher

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In this new novel, the first by a black woman ever to win the coveted Prix Goncourt, Marie NDiaye creates a luminous narrative triptych as harrowing as it is beautiful.

    This is the story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged, tyrannical father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a modest but contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her white boyfriend back to France, where his delusional depression and sense of failure poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband’s family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin (the aforementioned Fanta) who lives in France, a place Khady can scarcely conceive of but toward which she must now take desperate flight.

    With lyrical intensity, Marie NDiaye masterfully evokes the relentless denial of dignity, to say nothing of happiness, in these lives caught between Africa and Europe. We see with stunning emotional exactitude how ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength, even as their humanity is chipped away. Three Strong Women admits us to an immigrant experience rarely if ever examined in fiction, but even more into the depths of the suffering heart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateAug 7, 2012
    ISBN9780307958532
    Unavailable
    Three Strong Women
    Author

    Marie NDiaye

    Marie NDiaye met her father for the first time at age fifteen, two years before publishing her first novel. She is the recipient of the Prix Femina and the first Black woman to win the Prix Goncourt, the latter being the highest honour a French writer can receive. Longlisted for 2013 Man Booker International Prize, she is the author of a dozen plays and works of prose.

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    Reviews for Three Strong Women

    3.5/5

    124 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      An emotionally stirring and memorable book. This is the story of three women although one of the stories follows the unraveling of a woman's husband leaving the wife behind.The first story starts with Norah who is returning to Senegal to help out in a murky family affair. The second concerns Rudy and his African wife Fanta, and the last and most grim is the story of Khady.Norah and then Rudy try to discover the source of their blocked memories amid lives endured with indifferent , if not altogether hostile, families. Rudy , raised in Africa and now in France, is adrift in his unending failures and downward spiral of violence and disillusionment. Norah and then Rudy try to remember the circumstances of their exile. Norah returns to a father who tries to exploit her as he has betrayed his son. They all find themselves in a fog unable to see clearly the family crimes that haunt them.None of the characters is able to overcome the greed and malice of those around them. I try to describe the book in generalities as I hate revealing too much of the plot(s).I loved the book for its stunning writing, the bits of the surreal, and its sense of mystery overall.
    • 1/5
      It's a real shame this fell through for me, because I found the actual content of the stories interesting, but the writing style fell utterly flat. The style felt ponderous, repetitive, and slow. I'm not sure if this was because of the translation or what, but I gave up after the first story. I prefer a much lighter, snappier style.
    • 4/5
      This is not an easy read, but it is powerful and memorable. The book is in three sections which are almost independent of each other, which makes it very difficult to assess as a unified whole. All of them talk of journeys between France and Senegal.I can't resist talking about the final section first. This is an unflinching, powerful and harrowing depiction of a journey undertaken by a poor and ignorant woman who has been rejected by her dead husband's family in Senegal and is trying to reach France. For me this was very moving and the conclusion is devastating.The first part tells of a French lawyer returning to Senegal to visit her African father, who has summoned her because he thinks she can help her brother who is in prison accused of murdering the young stepmother with whom he has been having an affair.The second part is the longest, and I struggled a little to maintain interest in it, partly because it is told from the viewpoint of a man who is not a sympathetic narrator because he is full of guilt and self hatred. The strong woman in this part is his wife, who has left a good job as a teacher in Senegal after her husband has been dismissed after a fight with some students triggered when one of them brings up the subject of his father who murdered his business partner. His French mother has found him a job in France, but he is not happy there, and believes that his wife has been sleeping with his boss. The book is full of startling imagery and symbolism, and NDiaye is a talented writer, but it is a very bleak read.
    • 4/5
      On the face of it, this is a similar sort of deal to Gertrude Stein's Three lives: three novella-length pieces, each involving a strong female character. But it's also a kind of novel, as the three stories intersect in ways that aren't entirely straightforward and logical, and in places verge on the mystical. All three straddle the physical and cultural space between France and Senegal: in the first, Paris lawyer Norah is summoned to Senegal by her estranged father to deal with the aftermath of a family tragedy; in the second, we are in a small French town watching the life of disgraced schoolteacher Rudy unravel as his Senegalese wife Fanta remains enigmatically offstage; in the third, the young widow Khady Demba gets caught up in the horrors of the illegal migration trail across the Sahara to Europe. NDiaye's women are "strong" not in the conventional sense of being able to exercise power, but in the more particular sense that they have to have the moral strength to deal with more than their fair share of other people's (read: men's) problems without unravelling themselves. It's a book that's packed with anger at the injustices of the world and the selfishness of men and Europeans, and occasionally it seems to lose its direction in all that rage, but most of the time NDiaye's writing is sharp and devastating: it's well worth hanging in there through the woolly patches.
    • 4/5
      This book contains three stories. These stories are set in Africa and France. In the first story a middle aged woman, a lawyer, who hates her father and thinks him as the devil, is called by her father to come for a prolonged visit in her hometown. She being curious goes from France where she lives with her seven year daughter, her boyfriend and his own daughter. She comes to the town in Tanzania where her father lives just to discover her brother being accused of killing her stepmother. The story has touches of surrealism and is about a father's hold, the devil's grip, on his children.The second story narrates an eventful day in the life of Rudy Descas, a lazy, incompetent, vile person who wallows in self pity. He is given to flights of fancy. He fights with his wife and on his way to work, is afraid of her leaving him. At work after creating a ruckus he is asked to visit an client where his faulty designs have messed things up. Sure to get fired he romes about town. Throughout the whole story he pieces together his life and the gradual degeneration of his principles and values.The last story is about a dreamy widower. She has no means of supporting herself and stays with her poor in laws. Here she sells utensils at the market with her sister in laws. One day she is asked to leave and go to her cousin. Arrangements are made but she runs away. She meets a younger boy who promises to take her to Europe. She never reaches her destination and is betrayed by all.The book is less about the stories but more about the internal dialogue each protagonist has in his mind. All three of them live in their own world and try to make sense of the going ons in thir life with poor results. A slow but engaging read.
    • 3/5
      It is brilliant writing, with an intimate psychological depth and strangeness. Certainly not a book for anyone who likes resolutions. But in the end it bothered me that all of this brilliance and skill was devoted to portraying utterly trapped women, from their promising girlhoods to their ultimate dooms. I feel conflicted about this because there is nothing untrue about it, women are trapped and trap themselves in these exact ways every day, and it's not as if we are swamped with portrayals of this. That their fates were made so beautiful and spiritual may be what disturbs me.
    • 5/5
      So much build up of psychological tension in the first two parts! (I had to take some breaks). Although the third narrator's experience was by far the most harrowing, her state of mind was the calmest. I felt like something about the focus on mental state, individuality, personal freedom, etc. was particularly French, but I haven't read enough French literature to be sure. Aspect I admired the most: feeling, throughout, that NDiaye was revealing incredibly perceptive things about human nature and the way we think -- reading her characters' interior monologues, I constantly thought, yes, people are exactly like that.
    • 1/5
      This won the Goncourt Prize in 2009, and has been reviewed ecstatically. I read the principal novella of the three, the one that occupies two-thirds of the book. It is an extremely unappealing book: conservative and full of clichés. For me, the meliorating quality was the oddity of NDiaye’s way of thinking.At first it appears that what matters to NDiaye is the construction of elaborate long sentences that produce introspective surprises. Those sentences are often in single paragraphs, and even when she writes brief sentences she prefers them in individual paragraphs. (I haven’t checked the original French: I’m assuming that a translator wouldn’t make up such an obvious device.) As a result her thought—the inner monologue of the main character—stumbles along in single steps, as if each moment, each sentence, has to contain an insight, catharsis, or expressive image that needs to be savored, like an epigram, before the reader continues. At times the long sentences yield moments of unexpected or dense reflection that could compel a reader to stop a moment; but other times the sentences are not especially well-formed, expressive, or insightful:“That particularly striking quality of his, he recalled in the ensuing silence, a weakly panting silence that sounded as if he were phoning a far-off country with rudimentary communications, his words needing all these slow seconds to arrive, though it was only the echo of Fanta’s anxious breathing as she pondered the best way of answering his question so as to safeguard he knew not what—her dared not imagine—future interests she might have (a bubble of anger suddenly exploded in his head: what possible future could she envisage that didn’t include him?), yes, he recalled, as he let his eyes wander over the green vines with their tiny bright green grapes, over the green oaks beyond them that the property’s new owners, those Americans or Australians (who fascinated and upset Mummy because she believed the vineyard should have stayed in French hands), had pruned so savagely until the trees looked humiliated, punished for daring to let their shiny, unfading foliage grow so dense as to partially conceal the once grayish, now blond and fresh stonework of what was, after all, only a large house, though of the kind on which people of these parts bestowed the respectful name of ‘chateau,’ yes, that particularly striking impression that his own blondness, his own freshness, made over there… [Ellipses end the paragraph in the original.]This rhythm of language, of thinking, in which a thought stands by itself, and gives the thinker or reader a little shock of recognition, becomes monotonous—and not only when the longer thoughts (that is, the longer paragraphs) fail to yield any particular insight. NDiaye thinks one step at a time, like a senile person who takes one step, contemplates something, and then takes another step—or, because senility isn’t the issue here, perhaps more like a stamp collector, who puts each treasured object in its proper place and goes on to the next, row after row. I find it oddly limiting, as if she is herself afraid of thinking in longer stanzas.All that is one reason I found this book tiring. The other is its relentlessly conventional, bourgeois mentality. The main character is tortured by his past: he has lied to himself and more or less ruined his life, and in the course of the novella he loses his job, probably his wife, and his last connection to his mother. As a reader, you’re meant to feel his embarrassment when his co-workers, his boss, and even his own child shun him. He is awkward and unreliable; he sweats and scratches himself; he can’t quite see through his own self-deceptions. At the time time, like characters from Flaubert and Zola onward, he loves middle-class life: his job, until he loses it, is designing overly expensive kitchens for upwardly-aspiring clients, and he admires other people’s kitchens. All these things—the striving, the embarrassment, the class aspirations, the ruined ineffectual self-interrogation—are stocks in trade of the bourgeois novel, just the kind of thing Barthes dissected, just the sort of thing that modern and postmodern writing have left behind. It’s sad that there are people who still need to read these narratives of ordinary class-based despair.