Marie Ndiaye is a celebrated French novelist and linguist. She was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina in 2001 for Rosie Carpe, and in 2009 received France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, for Three Strong Women.
The Witch follows Lucie, an unassuming witch who hopes to pass her modest magical abilities on to her two daughters. Yet her greatest challenge lies elsewhere. Convinced that her own happiness depends on reconciling her estranged parents, she devotes herself to a quest that gradually consumes her.
At its heart, The Witch is a novel about the disintegration of family relationships. The supernatural enters the story almost imperceptibly—less as fantasy than as an entirely natural extension of everyday life. These magical elements illuminate the underlying strangeness of reality itself. The novel's gently parodic tone, its fleeting moments of fantasy, and their equally effortless disappearance suggest that life is itself dreamlike: ordinary precisely because of its peculiarities. In Ndiaye's world, people transform into birds or snails with startling ease, as though reflecting the lightness or heaviness of their emotional lives. Her prose is graceful and understated, standing in striking contrast to the often dark, inscrutable relationships between her characters.
I came across the English translation of The Witch and bought it before realising it had originally been written in French. Had I known, I would have bought the French edition instead.
