Self-Portrait in Green
Marie NDiaye, Jordan Stump (translation)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, & revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, & unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, & how those obsessions become us.
This 10th 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.