by Madhu Kaza
My reading schedule has little to do with the publishing industry's calendar of launches, prizes and promotions. When I look back on a year's worth of reading I note that much of what I read was not hot off the presses. My year end list of favorite books mostly includes works that were published in previous years. One great thing about books, though, is that for the most part they stick around. Whether they are on my own shelves or at the library I depend on them to live out long lives and wait for me.
Here are a few books that I loved this year:
Marie NDiaye, Self-Portrait in Green (English Translation: 2014, Jordan Stump)
Marie NDiaye is a boss writer; she does what she wants. Apparently she had agreed to write a memoir. It's
thrilling to see how she shattered genre expectations to create a strange, surreal and devastating portrait of women in this book.
In the opening pages the narrator sees a mysterious ghost-like woman in green by a banana tree from her car. She is dropping off her children at school. The children are described as docile. The narrator writes of their bodies: “a golden dust floats above their heads. Their foreheads are curved and serene, their napes still pale . . . my children's arms & legs are bare, because the air is warm, intoxicating.” It's all kind of eerie as if this were the beginning of a horror narrative.
The women in green figures proliferate and the book proceeds through confusion, misrecognition, transmogrification. Early on the narrator writes, “That's when I run into Cristina, but as soon as I see her I'm not sure it's her rather than Marie-Gabrielle or Alison… If this woman really is Cristina, I remember that she's my friend.” Cristina may also turn out to be a woman in green, not a phantasm exactly but not an ordinary woman (or conventional realist character) either. Self-Portrait in Green is full of playful, intriguing passages like this one.
I didn't know precisely what to make of the book when I finished it. I didn't know what the various women in green added up to. But I did know that I had read a beautifully written, strange and visionary work that I would need to read again.