Madeline Schwartz in The Paris Review:
Marie NDiaye’s books are often violent, but the violence takes highly particular forms. A person might find herself suddenly called a different name by everyone around her, like Fanny in Among Family (1990, translation 1997), or pregnant with a strange creature, as does Nadia in My Heart Hemmed In (2007, 2017). A lawyer might try to comprehend an act of infanticide; a woman working in a hotel might find herself in a sexual relationship with her boss, who has their encounters filmed. The shocking nature of such scenarios is offset by NDiaye’s prose, precise and formal, with a restraint that adds to her work’s unnerving quality: a placidity where one might expect horror. Claire Denis, with whom NDiaye wrote the screenplay for the film White Material (2009), has described her work as “unbearably sweet.”
In person, NDiaye is warm and gracious. She likes talking about babies, dinner parties, her friends’ books; she often wanted to know what I was reading, and to discuss movies she enjoyed, like Anatomy of a Fall and Mulholland Drive.
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