All My Friends

В антологию современной французской прозы "Полночь. XXI век" вошли произведения авторов издательства "Les Editions de Minuit", впервые переведенные на русский язык, - Ж.Эшноза, К.Гайи, Э. Ленуар, Э.Лоррана, М.Н'Дьяй, И.Равэ, Э.Савицкая. Эти авторы были названы Жеромом Лендоном, бессменным директором издательства с 1948 по 2001 гг., "поколением невозмутимых", вошедшим в литературу без шумных деклараций и манифестов, но которому, тем не менее, удалось полностью вписаться в современность и, исповедуя минимализм и стремление к коллажу, сместить с пьедестала литературной славы такое мощное явление, как "новый роман".

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.

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016.

Clarisse Rivière's life is shaped by a refusal to admit to her husband Richard and to her daughter Ladivine that her mother is a poor black housekeeper. Instead, weighed down by guilt, she pretends to be an orphan, visiting her mother in secret and telling no-one of her real identity as Malinka, daughter of Ladivine Sylla.

In time, her lies turn against her. Richard leaves Clarisse, frustrated by the unbridgeable, indecipherable gulf between them. Clarisse is devastated, but finds solace in a new man, Freddy Moliger, who is let into the secret about her mother, and is even introduced to her.

But Ladivine, her daughter, who is now married herself, cannot shake a bad feeling about her mother's new lover, convinced that he can bring only chaos and pain into her life. When she is proved right, in the most tragic circumstances, the only comfort the family can turn to requires a leap of faith beyond any they could have imagined.

Centred around three generations of women, whose seemingly cursed lineage is defined by the weight of origins, the pain of alienation and the legacy of shame, is a beguiling story of secrets, lies, guilt and forgiveness by one of Europe's most unique literary voices.

In this new novel, the first by a black woman ever to win the coveted Prix Goncourt, Marie NDiaye creates a luminous narrative triptych as harrowing as it is beautiful.

This is the story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged, tyrannical father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a modest but contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her white boyfriend back to France, where his delusional depression and sense of failure poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband’s family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin (the aforementioned Fanta) who lives in France, a place Khady can scarcely conceive of but toward which she must now take desperate flight.

With lyrical intensity, Marie NDiaye masterfully evokes the relentless denial of dignity, to say nothing of happiness, in these lives caught between Africa and Europe. We see with stunning emotional exactitude how ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength, even as their humanity is chipped away. admits us to an immigrant experience rarely if ever examined in fiction, but even more into the depths of the suffering heart.