Vengeance Is Mine
A novel
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2.3 • 9 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer’s childhood.
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CrimeReads, and Words Without Borders
"[NDiaye] is a master at agitating, probing and upending expectations." —Lovia Gyarkye, The New York Times Book Review
"You won’t be able to put it down." —Vogue
The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack.
She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can’t quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for such an important trial?
While this mystery preoccupies Maître Susane, at home she is increasingly concerned about Sharon, her faithful but peculiar housekeeper. Sharon arrived from Mauritius with her husband and children, and she lacks legal residency in France. But while Maître Susane has generously offered Sharon her professional services, the housekeeper always finds ways to evade her, claiming the marriage certificate Maître Susane requires is being held hostage. Is Sharon being honest with Maître Susane, or is something more sinister going on?
Told in a slow seethe recalling the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of Patricia Highsmith’s work, Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her own past that threatens to become her undoing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ndiaye's magnetic and intense latest (after That Time of Year) follows a French lawyer's downward spiral when she takes on a sensationalized murder case. Maître Susane, 42, is an undistinguished lawyer in Bordeaux whose life is upended when Gilles Principaux asks her to defend his wife, Marlyne, for the murder of their three children. Further complicating matters for Maître Susane is her housekeeper, Sharon, an undocumented Mauritian living in France with her husband and children: Maître Susane feels uncomfortable being her employer and so spares her such tasks as cleaning the toilet, and yet Sharon seems to dislike her, even, on one occasion, going as far as pretending not to see Maître Susane in a supermarket. Ndiaye's incendiary premise is really a jumping-off point to track her protagonist's roiling inner world: at one point, Maître Susane refuses to look at herself in the mirror, certain that "she wasn't feeling strong enough to choose between the rational woman and the woman who wasn't, but often understood things more rightly." The author is equally adept at both small-scale psychological character insight and virtuosic structural shifts—the highlight of the novel is a harrowing, unforgettable 10-page monologue that Marlyne delivers from behind bars. Ndiaye turns in another ferocious tale.
Customer Reviews
Boring and weird
I unfortunately read the entire novel, waiting for something to make sense or happen. The author is great at creating mood, tension and conflict, but there are too many story holes, unfinished thoughts, dead end story lines, and story line confusion. My sense is that the book was rushed to print, not edited, and unfinished.