Self-Portrait in Green - by Marie Ndiaye (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Originally published as: Autoportrait en vert Ã2005 Mercure de France"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

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.

This 10^th anniversary hardcover edition of Marie NDiaye's genre-defying classic restores photographs that appeared in the original French edition alongside Jordan Stump's dazzling translation, revealing in English, at last, the complete vision of NDiaye's influential masterpiece.

Review Quotes

"This book may be a novel or fable; it may be memoir, autofiction, or photo essay. One certainty? This small story is too big for one genre box. A 10th-anniversary edition of NDiaye's mercurial chronicle--of encounters between an unnamed narrator and a mysterious parade of 'women in green'--includes dreamlike photos, some by French photographer Julie Ganzin which first appeared in the original French release....Stump, a frequent translator of NDiaye's work, preserves the enigma as well. NDiaye's glittering narrative prism reflects more than green--it reflects a life." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This thrillingly unconventional story from NDiaye is all the more beguiling for resisting easy categorization or interpretation....NDiaye's restless, haunting inquiry will linger in readers' minds." --Publishers Weekly (stared review)

"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