Marie Ndiaye begins her new
novel "Mine is revenge" very clearly when the main character touches her forehead to feel if she is bleeding.
The story of the middle-aged lawyer Maïtre Susane, who never gets a first name in the story, nor her parents, resembles a tournament staged by an unknown ruler.
The stakes are high, class society a roulette where a loss means death.
Now the favored child of the working class is one with its title, and thus also homeless and alienated, as so often in this authorship where mothers and daughters are cut apart by the education that would liberate.
In the novel "Min är hämnden" (translated by Ragna Essén), the author follows the habit of all scars in the body of society, true to his habitual class journey.
The class trips are many
in Swedish literature this spring, captured in painful scenes by, among others, Zara Kjellner, Nina de Geer and Nina Wähä.
Symptomatically, it is the so-called household services that are at the center.
The housekeepers, the cleaners, the au pairs with origins far away.
It is a picture of the new Sweden, which echoes the old service spirits in black and white that were so common in novels and films from the 20th century.
At NDiaye, too, a cleaning lady is at the center, and with her the hypocrisy and shame of the new class, which Maïtre Susane must also put on.
The wound rubs even though it is not yet visible.
The situation becomes urgent only when the lawyer gets a new client, the rich Mr. Principaux who wants her to undertake the defense of his wife who drowned the couple's three small children.
The mother is also a class traveler, and the murders may be a way to free the children.
The depiction of marriage
and parenthood is a suffocatingly dense depiction of horror - the novel's thriller feature.
But NDiaye turns it into a ghost story that vibrates with contemporary migratory currents in a mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Gilman Perkin's gothic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper".
Children howl like dogs.
Maïtre Susane's maid cooks food that arouses terrible feelings (the charge around the food is recognizable from NDiaye's "La Cheffe", in Swedish 2018).
And all the time - it's the horror - the main characters are engaged in seemingly irrelevant details.
Chases memories and lines while the world collapses.
Who's talking?
Who can you trust?
Ghost story. Surrealistic
dream world.
Friction-filled at the same time.
Marie NDiaye captivates her readers at all levels.
She keeps all the wounds we fear open in spellbinding ominous novels.