Power and Uncertainty in Marie NDiaye’s “Vengeance is Mine”

Five of the best translated novels of 2023

Kat Solomon

2023

The protagonist of Vengeance is Mine, (translated by Jordan Stump from La Vengeance m’appartient), Marie NDiaye’s twelfth novel, is known to the reader only by her title and surname. A French lawyer, she is Maître Susane, and at the novel’s opening, she has recently opened a struggling law practice. She drives an ancient car that she hopes encourages others to see her as “a woman of discreetly eccentric charm,” but really, she yearns to be able to buy a new one from a luxury brand. When she visits her doting parents, she parks down the street so that they won’t be reminded of her failures. As in much of NDiaye’s work, the novel’s tension turns around the gap between its main character’s self-knowledge, the perception of others, and reality.

 

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Five of the best translated novels of 2023

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Javier Marías’s final book, a love affair in 1980s East Berlin, reincarnation in France, a story of obsession and a South Korean romp

John Self
Friday 8 December 2023

Tomás Levinson
Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton)
“I was brought up in the old-fashioned way, and could never have dreamed that one day I would be ordered to kill a woman.” Ah, how we will miss the late Javier Marías and his unique genre of slow-motion page-turners, blending thrillery plots with long, equivocating sentences. His final work, a “companion novel” to its predecessor, Berta Isla, tells the story of a washed-up spy chasing down a terrorist, and is full of the complexities, comedy and most of all contradictions that define his work. Fittingly, its closing words are “Possibly. You never know.”