Self-Portrait in Green

by Marie NDiaye, Jordan Stump (Translator)

Overview

It seems there is no genre of writing Marie NDiaye will not make her own. Asked to write a memoir, she turned in this paranoid fantasia of rising floodwaters, walking corpses, eerie depictions of her very own parents, and the incessant reappearance of women in green. Just who are these green women? They are powerful (one was NDiaye’s disciplinarian grade-school teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost and may be visible only to the author). They are seductive (one stole a friend’s husband). And they are unbearably personal (one is NDiaye’s own mother). They are all, in their way, aspects of their creator, at once frightening, menacing, and revealing of everything submerged within the consciousness of this singular literary talent. A courageous, strikingly honest, and unabashedly innovative self-portrait, NDiaye’s kaleidoscopic look at the women in green is a revelation to us all — about how we form our identities, how we discover those things we repress, and how our obsessions become us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931883429
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	10/20/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	211 KB

About the Author

Marie NDiaye met her father for the first time at age 15, two years before publishing her first novel. She is the recipient of the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, the latter being highest honor a French writer can receive. One of ten finalists for the 2013 International Booker Prize, alongside Lydia Davis and Marilynne Robinson, she is the author of over a dozen plays and works of prose. Jordan Stump is a two-time nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. One of the leading translators of innovative French literature, he has translated books by Nobel laureate Claude Simon, plus Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Eric Chevillard, and Jules Verne’s French-language novel The Mysterious Island.

Editorial Reviews

Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement.” —The New York Review of Books


“One of the most mysterious, spectral, appealing and uncategorizable books I've ever read.” —Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night



“This novel not only seems to change each time I return to it, but also to shape-shift during the act of reading. An adult woman with young children, the narrator is at once detached from and vividly connected to her surroundings, never more so when encountering one of the ‘women in green’ that haunt her past, present and future. The women in green are a slippery, diffuse category—beautiful, glamorous, dangerous—which the narrator is both afraid of and bewitched by.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

"Marie NDiaye's Self Portrait in Green is phenomenal." —Idra Novey, author of Ways of Disappearing

"NDiaye’s two early books, All My Friends and Self-Portrait in Green . . . are so extraordinarily vivid and controlled" —The New Republic

"[C]ompelling and tightly written. . . . Rather like a Francis Bacon triptych, there is nothing fixed, comforting or coherent about the narrator’s identity or idea of herself, but the image she projects is incredibly vivid. . . . [NDiaye's] prose reads effortlessly in Jordan Stump’s fine translation." —Times Literary Supplement

“Self-Portrait in Green is a sort of malicious reverie where the real mingles with the imagined, the living with the dead, the water with the land.” —The Express (Paris)

“It’s a book that, once read, leaves you wondering what to think about it . . . knowing . . . you had a thought-provoking evening.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[W]ades through feminine fear, power, and insecurity like no other book I’ve encountered.” —Flavorwire

""[A]n exploration of the sources of fiction and the way that fiction and memoir mix . . . a representation of the artist’s mind, questions, anxieties, pleasures, and all." —Necessary Fiction

"Marie NDiaye has created a tiny, psychological masterpiece with her Self-Portrait in Green." —Three Percent

"Self-Portrait in Green is a book that defies easy categorization. . . . In NDiaye’s world, ghosts are not as rare as we might think, nor are they like other ghosts, or as you or I probably imagine [them]." — 3:AM Magazine

From the Publisher