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the complete review - fiction

All my Friends

by
Marie NDiaye

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : a fine touch; nice introduction to the author

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Leurs fêlures comptent plus que leur identité, les tensions qui les traversent ont plus d'importance que leurs apparences. Avec ses nouvelles, Marie Ndiaye est entrée dans l'atelier des sentiments. Elle travaille sur quelques épures, des crampes nerveuses, en fait: la fébrilité, l'amertume, l'impatience, l'appréhension, l'absence de consolation, la jalousie. Jamais sur la chair. Ni sur le mouvement (sauf celui des caractères)." - Daniel Rondeau, L'Express
  
  
• "Stump's perfectly calibrated translation captures the rich timbre and fearsome bite of NDiaye's chiseled prose. Empathy may not be NDiaye's strong suit -- she prefers a kind of lacerating sincerity -- but that may be the price to pay for such lucid and affecting stories." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       All my Friends is a collection of five stories that, far from celebrating friendship, are tales of dissociation, revealing characters who are unable find to find connection even with those who should be closest to them, family or friends. This is presented most obviously in the first (and title-)story, in which the narrator, a teacher who now employs one of his former students as a housekeeper, can at best briefly manipulate others; in what is a typical closing scene in this collection -- suggestive, at the brink of something, yet without spelling everything out exactly -- he explains what he plans to a woman who literally cannot comprehend him. Yet even in this story, that is only a final scene displaying how removed he is from everyone else: as he has related earlier, his wife -- also a teacher -- abandoned him, taking the kids with her; another former student, Werner, even changed his name because it was the same as his teacher's.
       Friendship and connection linger in many of the stories in All my Friends, but as abstraction -- in the characters' minds, rather than in their reality. In 'All my Friends' the teacher still fixates on those who were his students fifteen years earlier, and clearly has not fully accepted the loss of his wife and children. Even more obviously, in 'The Death of Claude François', Zaka explains to her daughter that she's visiting: "My best friend, even if it's been thirty years since I last saw her". And, leaving the girl outside when she visits her friend, she can't find the child when she comes out again:

Paula herself, or the silhouette that might have been hers, took off as well, in the other direction. The cold shadow of a building swallowed her up.

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 July 2013

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Links:

• Two Lines Press publicity page
• Les Éditions de Minuit publicity page
• Q & A with Jordan Stump

• Booksexy Review
• The Collagist
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• L'Express (French)
• Kenyon Review
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• The Novel World
• parutions (French)
• PopMatters
• Publishers Weekly
• The Rumpus
• Télérama (French)
• Three Percent
• Die Welt (German)

• Ladivine
• My Heart Hemmed In
• Self-Portrait in Green

• See Index of French literature

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About the Author:

       French author Marie NDiaye was born in 1967.

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© 2013-2021 the complete review

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