Ladivine: A novel
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0385351887
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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
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Summoning up the image of her weeping figurines, and how they might help her now. Was it not their job to suffer in her stead? She swallowed, once again heard a dim, piercing plaint deep inside her ears. Her figurines were meant to do the weeping, a frantic little voice was saying over and over in her head, so her own eyes would stay dry and no one would know what she was going through. A thousand needles pricked her lower eyelids. She squeezed the rail with all her might, almost resigned, in.
Father, still keeping his distance. Filled with a compassion she’d never before felt for her husband, an almost disinterested sympathy, Clarisse sensed that he was shielding himself from the crushing physical authority, the simultaneously attractive and repellent omnipotence that had entered the house with his father. How strange to see Richard trembling, he who ordinarily showed no fear of anyone! She went and stood at his side, their arms touching. She could feel him quivering in turmoil and.
Away from the sunny world of the street, where the odor of french fries, now stronger, seemed the very essence of innocent freedom. Ladivine unconsciously picked up her pace, anxious to put the grimy façade of the Panky behind her, and the Blue Hot farther on, presided over with icy indifference by women who could have been her, Ladivine Rivière, since her parents had never cautioned her against anything and would have treated her to their blind, cheerful visits and unconditional love had she.
Gazing on Marko’s, Daniel’s, and Annika’s sleeping faces, one by one; it was the anticipation of that matchless joy that pulled her from her slumbers, that made her get up and walk soundlessly through the apartment, her blood throbbing in her neck, not her mother’s blood but her own, neatly contained in vessels that no loser would ever set out to slash with a knife. And it was Marko’s face that she looked at the longest, sometimes drowsing, then waking again with a start, but never slipping out.
Who, though only eight, thought herself seasoned enough to calmly accept that her mother had chosen to look after them from inside the skin of a dog on the Droysenstrasse’s icy sidewalk, whereas her father, she thought, her poor distraught father, should he ever realize such a thing, could never accept it without even more grief than he already felt. Annika was unhappy with her mother for choosing this way of leaving them. It was November. The sidewalks were covered with packed, frozen snow,.