The French writers refusal to overexplain makes her books even more unsettling.
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Marie NDiayedoes not seekclarity.She is nearsighted, but you wont find her in glasses.
Their worlds are inhospitableand uncanny, their families estranged or indifferent.
Staying in an ambiguity, even in a form of discomfort that suits me very well, she said.
In France, she is among the countrys most famous living authors.
NDiaye herself avoids labels.
I have met many French people raised in Africa who are more African than I am.
Vengeance Is Minebegins with a troubling encounter.
She lives in Paris, where she settled in 2021 as a divorcee.
Simple she writes two to threehours a day.
She has never had writers block.
In the early aughts, a publisher invited her to write a memoir.
In 2005 she publishedSelf-Portrait in Green, a beguiling quasi-autofictionalwork.
Her whiteFrench mother and Senegalese father met in the capital as students.
A monstrously bored high-school student, she began working on what would become her first novel during and afterclass.
Critics declared her a literary prodigy of staggering brilliance.
After high school, NDiaye worked briefly as a server in Paris and kept writing.
Her second novel,Comedie classique, was a 100-plus-page sentence.
(NDiaye would later admit that she had been afraid of banality.)
Throughout her career, critics have attempted to read her worksfantastical intrusions within African or postcolonial traditions.
NDiaye has remained unyielding in her self-identification as French.
She thinks about Senegal, where she has been only twice, in a dreamlike way.
Its like if you asked me what I think of India or Ukraine.
I have no legitimacy to have any feelings about that country whatsoever.
NDiaye has mostly refrained from discussing politics, save fordenouncingSarkozysmonstrous Franceafter moving to Germany and winning the Goncourt.
Her brother, Pap Ndiaye they style their last name differently tried to go another way.
NDiaye has publiclydefendedher brother against his critics as a man of consensus and compromise.
One major difference betweenSaint OmerandVengeance Is Mineis that this time, the mother does not appear to be Black.
When I asked NDiaye why she decided to deviate on this detail, she seemed caught off guard.
She did not want to imply that the hardships faced by a Black mother motivated the act of violence.
When I later spoke to her again, she doubled down on Marlynes racial blankness, as written.
I am well aware that when you dont clarify, the first idea is that shes white.
I dont know how to deal with that, she said, then steered the conversation to herself.
I live in a white world, and I never saw myself as different.
I was neither white nor Black.
I was just me.
During her childhood, she said, the banlieue had different problems.
I dont think we had any, actually, NDiaye laughed.
I would feel like an imposter if I said I had problems.
Both seem true, depending on whos looking.
I have no desire to be radical, she said.
Its my impression that radicalism is, precisely, the enemy of ambiguity.
