Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 30)

This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the work of Marie NDiaye, born in central France in 1967, winner of the Prix Femina (2001), the Prix Goncourt (2009), shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2013), and widely considered to be one of the most important French authors of her generation. Andrew Asibong argues that at the heart of NDiayes world lurks an indefinable blankness which makes it impossible for the reader to decode narrative at the level of psychology or event. NDiayes texts explore social stigmata and familial disintegration with a violence unmatched by any of her contemporaries, but in doing so they remain as strangely affectless and unrecognizable as their dissociated protagonists. Considering each of NDiayes works in chronological order (including her novels, theatre, short fiction and writing for children), Asibong assesses the aesthetic, emotional and political stakes of NDiayes portraits of impenetrable selfhood. His book provides an original and provocative framework within which to read NDiaye as a simultaneously hybrid and hyper-French cultural figure, fascinating and fantastical practitioner of the postmodern - and reluctantly postcolonial - 'blank arts'.