Marie Ndiaye’s latest novel, Vengeance is Mine (translated by Jordan Stump) is perhaps her most disquieting and intense yet. It begins when Gilles Principaux walks into the office of Maitre (an honorific title of a lawyer) Susane requesting that she represent his wife, Marlynne, who is awaiting trial after killing their three young children. Susane is convinced that she knows Principaux, believing him to be “the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time, long ago, in a Cauderan house” and cannot think of any other reason he would have come to her:
“I who am not a lawyer known throughout Bordeaux, particularly given the seriousness of the case.”
The memory, presented initially as “luminous” and “the happiest moment of her life”, will grow in ambiguity as the novel progresses. The original meeting took place when Susane was ten and Principaux (if he is, indeed, who she thinks he is) was fifteen when her mother took her to a house where she was employed to iron. They never met again, and her mother can no longer remember the house or even the name with any certainty. Susane regards the meeting, which allowed her a glimpse into the lives of the middle classes, as the reason she became a lawyer, and her mother encouraged her to go with the boy “aiming to lift her daughter high above her own station.”
Susane’s life is further complicated by her housekeeper, Sharon, an immigrant she helping to achieve legal status, whom she employs “as an act of militancy, to help further a cause I support” but whose presence in her house makes her feel “uncomfortable” as she cannot accommodate herself to their employer / employee relationship wishing for a stronger, purer bond:
“I’ll never let you down, Sharon, believe in me, thought Susane as hard as she could.”
This is not only revealing in terms of the unexpected importance she places on their relationship, but also in demonstrating the intensity of Susane’s feelings which she rarely communicates. As the reader is locked into her point of view, the narrative itself can be uncomfortably claustrophobic as we are hemmed in by the ferocity of the character’s emotions with no outlet.
The same applies when considering her difficult relationship with her parents, a difficulty that is similarly caused by a love that is demanding both of others and herself:
“She loved them so!
“And how it hurt to love them, sometimes!”
When she questions her mother about Principaux she knows “she was trying to tease out a truth that was secretly what she’d come looking for, not knowing of that truth would be good for her.” To what extent her obsession with this early memory is to blame for the uncomfortable nature of her relationship the reader must decide (though the novel is at pains to avoid any clarity of cause and effect). Her only friend is an ex-boyfriend, Rudy, whose young daughter, Lily, Susane’s parents sometimes look after.
Children, and their need for love and protection, is a recurring theme in the novel. When Rudy asks Sharon to look after Lily, Susane worries about her safety even though she suggested it. (Lily’s mother is largely absent, another adult who does not accept the responsibility of protecting their child – though it is also hinted that Susane may be the mother). The murder of Principaux’s children raises the question of whether Marlynne alone can be blamed or whether her husband’s “strange coldness” makes her seem “less blameworthy than the father with his surprising reactions.” He certainly seems to be more concerned with his wife (who does not want to see him) than he is with his loss. And behind all of this is the memory that Susane holds dear, and the suspicion that there is more to it she cannot remember – perhaps she, too, was not protected.
All this may make Vengeance is Mine seem like a difficult novel to love, yet its hypnotic prose carries the reader along with an unyielding tension. On the rare occasions we escape Susane’s viewpoint, it is to encounter the other characters in statements such as they might give in a court, with each individual trapped in their own version of events. As is often the case with Ndiaye’s novels, it veers unexpectedly towards the end but on this occasion, it does not lose focus. It is easy to see why John Self selected it as one of the best translated novels of 2023.
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