Vengeance is Mine

A novel of concentric haunting, summoning ghosts into the room with prose that shimmers, cuts, and sings. Unflinching and restrained, Vengeance is Mine sails its readers into uncharted psychological waters. I was hypnotised from the first word to the last
In this disquieting, quietly beautiful novel, Marie NDiaye writes about an unimaginable crime placing around it a world of confusion, trauma, and memories of a past that cannot be trusted. There's more questions than answers in this fiercely intelligent story: everyone is complex and full of shadows, as life is
NDiaye balances external and internal revelations to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters, and of what happens when a parent's unconditional love breaks down
[NDiaye] is a master at agitating, probing and upending expectations...In 'Vengeance Is Mine,' NDiaye circles a familiar configuration of ideas: trauma and memory, class anxiety, isolation and otherness, the warped savagery of domestic life, the rupture between parents and their children. But she also considers the texture of justice - what it means, how it's determined and who enacts it...Appreciating this moody, sensual and sometimes feverish prose requires submission - to the grooves of language, the performance of storytelling
The magnificence of [NDiaye's] writing, in all its shocks of perception, makes you feel that by rights her name should come with the same pantheonic glow that attends, say, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante
The central ideas in "Vengeance Is Mine" are, thrillingly, as difficult to pin down as the identities of its characters. In one light, it's a scathing look at the simmering desperation provoked by France's rigid structures of authority and power. But it's also an uber-feminist rewriting of a plot made familiar by texts from "Medea" to Leïla Slimani's bestseller "The Perfect Nanny" (2018) [published as "Lullaby" in the UK], in which oppression, writ large, drives a woman to horrifying violence against the children in her care. And, read in a less outraged mood, it's just a quiet book about a quiet woman, quietly fragmenting - no more, no less...[NDiaye] is a poet of uncertainty. Her ability to simultaneously embody all the fractured parts of a character's mind makes aspects of Susane's spiral that might otherwise seem unbelievable - can she really not know whether she is the mother of Rudy's child? - come across as engrossingly, utterly human
In her novels, Ndiaye plunges her characters, usually women, into a visceral experience of difference, often without naming what that difference is... her texts still inspire a paranoia about how to read her protagonists, catching us in a game of complicity
A haunting, mysterious tour de force
Vengeance Is Mine might present an answer to how the "trauma plot" - in which a character works through a damaging experience from their past - can remain fresh
The result is a complex knot of guilt, fear and obsession, which compresses a great deal into 240 pages without ever seeming clotted
NDiaye's award-winning writing is dreamy, elusive, and brilliant, shifting genres and forms...Vengeance is Mine is, to my mind, one of NDiaye's very best novels, with a devastating plot and a continual sense of surprise. It rewards repeat reading and careful attention