Three Strong Women
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three Senegalese women rely on their unshakable sense of self when faced with great disappointment in this novel from NDiaye, the first black woman to win France's Prix Goncourt. Three loosely interwoven sections tell stories of women whose struggle for self-preservation has irrevocably wounded them. When French lawyer Norah, summoned to Senegal by her estranged father, arrives, she finds her beloved brother, Sony, in jail for murder and her father grown old. In Part II, Rudy brings Fanta, his Senegalese wife, back to France. Fanta has worked hard to pull herself out of poverty, only to now find herself plunged back in when the wealth Rudy promised never materializes. In Part III, Khady, a young woman who has never heard of Europe, is kicked out by her late husband's family to go live with Fanta in France. But she falls in with a questionable man who persuades her to make the dangerous journey with him. Each woman calls upon great strength to survive amid failure and humiliation, a feat that goes unnoticed by those around them. NDiaye's quiet intelligence is made apparent by the complexity of her characters and her intuitive prose in this subtly beautiful novel.
