Self-Portrait in Green
$9.95
2 in stock
Additional Info
- ISBN: 978-1-931883-39-9
- Size: 4.5" x 7"
- Pages: 100
- Publication Date: November 1, 2014
- Distributed By: Publishers Group West
“One of the most mysterious, spectral, appealing and uncategorizable books I’ve ever read.” —Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night
“This novel not only seems to change each time I return to it, but also to shape-shift during the act of reading.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul
Who are the green women? They are powerful (one is a disciplinarian teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost). They are seductive (one marries her best friend’s father). And they are unbearably personal (one is the author’s own mother).
They are all aspects of their creator: Marie NDiaye, an author celebrated worldwide as one of France’s leading writers. Here, in her own skewed take on the memoir, NDiaye combs through all the menacing, beguiling, and revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, and unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, and how those obsessions become us.
Praise
Winner of the 2015 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction
Named one of Flavorwire’s Best Novels of 2014
“This novel not only seems to change each time I return to it, but also to shape-shift during the act of reading. An adult woman with young children, the narrator is at once detached from and vividly connected to her surroundings, never more so when encountering one of the ‘women in green’ that haunt her past, present and future. The women in green are a slippery, diffuse category—beautiful, glamorous, dangerous—which the narrator is both afraid of and bewitched by.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul
“One of the most mysterious, spectral, appealing and uncategorizable books I’ve ever read.” —Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night
“[A] master of haunted, tilted, postcolonial worlds backlit by a kind of fever logic.…I’m not much one for listing favorites, but if you twisted my arm, NDiaye is probably one of the first names I’d give up.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Visitors
“[NDiaye] blurs herself into her hallucinatory descriptions of these women, posing the question: What is the difference between what we observe and what we experience? The terrifying conclusion could be just as unsettling: no such line exists.”
—Jac Jemc, author of False Bingo
“Marie NDiaye is a master of creating menacing, off-kilter worlds that speak to the truth of human experience.” —Ayşegül Savas, author of White on White
“NDiaye, who received France’s most prestigious literary prize…may be that nation’s most startling new literary voice.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[NDiaye] is increasingly—and justly—recognized as a major world writer.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books
“[NDiaye’s] is a unique voice among other contemporary French writers, and her fictional vision both intricate and distinctive. She is an example of exactly the kind of non-Anglophone writer who should have already been translated in full. Hopefully, this new translation will renew interest in her work, prompt further translations, and give English readers the chance to experience her entire contribution to world letters.” —The Rumpus
“Compelling and tightly written.…Rather like a Francis Bacon triptych, there is nothing fixed, comforting, or coherent about the narrator’s identity or idea of herself, but the image she projects is incredibly vivid.… [NDiaye’s] prose reads effortlessly in Jordan Stump’s fine translation.” —Times Literary Supplement
“It’s a book that, once read, leaves you wondering what to think about it…knowing…you had a thought-provoking evening.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[W]ades through feminine fear, power, and insecurity like no other book I’ve encountered.” —Flavorwire
“Unsentimental in tone and kaleidoscopic in form, Self-Portrait in Green teems with the uncanny texture of a recurring dream. Marie NDiaye’s hauntingly spare novel works the terrain between Toussaint’s microfiction and Leve’s autofiction to gesture toward a new French narrative—smaller and stranger and toothier than before.” —Hal Hlavinka, Community Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)
Marie NDiaye
was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.
Books
Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.
Jordan Stump
Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine. His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Books
Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine. His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Excerpt
December 2003 — Evening has come, and the Garonne is rising hour after hour in the dark.
We all know the river can rise nine meters above its banks before it overflows, thanks to the levees surrounding the village.
That much we know. It’s the first thing you learn when you make up your mind to settle in this place, eternally under threat from the floodwaters of the Garonne. What we don’t know this evening is what’s coming tonight, or tomorrow—if, like last time, ten months ago, the water will stop at the top of the levees, or, as it did twenty-two years ago, spill over, submerge the streets, invade the ground floor of the houses, sometimes the second floor, sometimes the whole house.