Ladivine
A novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the hugely acclaimed author of Three Strong Women—“a masterpiece of narrative ingenuity and emotional extremes” (The New York Times)—here is a harrowing and subtly crafted novel of a woman captive to a secret shame.
On the first Tuesday of every month, Clarisse Rivière leaves her husband and young daughter and secretly takes the train to Bordeaux to visit her mother, Ladivine. Just as Clarisse’s husband and daughter know nothing of Ladivine, Clarisse herself has hidden nearly every aspect of her adult life from this woman, whom she dreads and despises but also pities. Long ago abandoned by Clarisse’s father, Ladivine works as a housecleaner and has no one but her daughter, whom she knows as Malinka.
After more than twenty-five years of this deception, the idyllic middle-class existence Clarisse has built from scratch can no longer survive inside the walls she’s put up to protect it. Her untold anguish leaves her cold and guarded, her loved ones forever trapped outside, looking in. When her husband, Richard, finally leaves her, Clarisse finds comfort in the embrace of a volatile local man, Freddy Moliger. With Freddy, she finally feels reconciled to, or at least at ease with, her true self. But this peace comes at a terrible price. Clarisse will be brutally murdered, and it will be left to her now-grown daughter, who also bears the name Ladivine without knowing why, to work out who her mother was and what happened to her.
A mesmerizing and heart-stopping psychological tale of a trauma that ensnares three generations of women, Ladivine proves Marie NDiaye to be one of Europe’s great storytellers.
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sadness, regret, and insidious dread permeate every page of this beautifully crafted, relentless novel. NDiaye's (All My Friends) story chronicles a curse handed down from mother to daughter. Ladivine, a woman of mysterious origin, raises a daughter, Malinka, in France. A haughty child who has never known her father, Malinka begins to refer to her mother simply as "the servant" and eventually leaves home. She makes a new life for herself as Clarisse, and though she travels once a month to visit Ladivine in Bordeaux, she coldheartedly reveals not a single detail of her new life, not even about her husband, Richard, or that she has a daughter, also named Ladivine. But the vacant Clarisse must pay for her coldness. Richard leaves Clarisse, and years later, when Clarisse decides to go back to being Malinka perhaps her true self murderous consequences ensue after she shares the truth about her past with a sinister new boyfriend. Terrible, eerie things happen to the younger Ladivine when she goes on holiday with her own husband and two children, to a foreign (and unspecified) land that NDiaye hints may be the place where her namesake was born. Most unsettling is that people in this hot, poor country seem to believe they have seen Ladivine before, that indeed they know her. A familial strain of darkness runs through the lives of these women, and they must atone. Themes concerning race, as well as supernatural forces, sometimes canine in form, always lurk nearby in this tale.