Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 7: "My Heart Hemmed In" by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump
106 Plays1 year ago
We're going weekly! As the episodes have grown longer we've decided to split them up so instead of discussing two titles per episode (and delivering a 2+ hour podcast) every other week we're switching to one title every week. A guide to the next few episodes will be up on the Substack shortly.
This week we dig into Marie NDiaye's My Heart Hemmed In, translated by Jordan Stump and published by Two Lines Press. This one is Lori's recommendation and, folks, she did not miss. It's a phenomenal novel, and one that rather speaks to the moment we're in (have always been in?).
Books mentioned in this episode:
- Other titles by Marie NDiaye, including The Chef and Ladivine
- Kafka's, well, everything
- The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean
- The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
- You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin
- Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
- Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, translated by Michiel Heyns
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Weather Talk
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi Lori, how's it going today?
00:00:29
Speaker
It's going well, Tom, and how are you? I am doing well. Summer is in full swing in Chicago, so we're alternating between extreme heat and weird cold. Today is one of the weirdly colder days. I mean, it's in the 70s, but it feels weirdly cold, which I think is something that only Chicago can really pull off properly, but yeah.
Discussion of 'My Heart Hemmed In'
00:00:52
Speaker
Today we're talking about my heart hemmed in by Marie NDA and that was your recommendation.
00:01:03
Speaker
Laurie, what the hell is this book? That is a really good question when I was rediscovering it in preparation for this podcast. And this would have been like my third or fourth time reading it. We actually did this book.
00:01:23
Speaker
for the Interabang, my bookstores, in-store book club, and that had some mixed reaction. I think that it was perhaps a little too weird for most people, and it is a really weird book. There is an awful lot going on in this book, but
00:01:53
Speaker
an awful lot of what is kind of very hard to define. You're kind of left scratching your head quite a bit and thinking, what, what the hell is happening? It's not so much, I think, that it's tricky from a stylistic point of view.
Book's Narrative Style
00:02:10
Speaker
I mean, it's the narrative, I think, is, is pretty straightforward. You know, pretty basic. There's a lot of
00:02:17
Speaker
There's a lot of dialogue in it. So I don't think it's a particularly tricky read if you are willing to just kind of
00:02:29
Speaker
roll with it and kind of just withhold any sense of potential reality for what the characters are describing or how they're reacting or what they think that they're seeing and just kind of let it roll over you. And I don't know. I really enjoy
00:02:59
Speaker
Everything by Marie and I that I've that I've read. I think now that I've read most of her work that's been translated into English, My Heart Hammed In is maybe my second favorite of hers. And it's published by a small press, two lines.
00:03:17
Speaker
out of California, which is also affiliated with the Center for Translation. There's a novel that she's had published by Knopf in English translation. And that novel is called La Divine. And I think that one's my favorite. But there are similarities in her novels with this kind of, I don't know, Tom,
00:03:42
Speaker
I don't know whether you'd call it surrealism, magic realism.
Surreal and Magical Realist Elements
00:03:47
Speaker
What do you think? I was thinking, I try not to do too much review reading before we have these conversations that kind of come in, you know, with my reactions. But with this one, I was just kind of, as you said, there's so much going on. And there, there's so many layers to it. I was kind of curious what all
00:04:06
Speaker
what all others said about it. And one, one quote I saw on like the Wikipedia, I mean, there's an entire, which is interesting, an entire Wikipedia entry for this one novel, which usually isn't the case. It might have like, there might be an entry, but there won't be like this long discussion of
00:04:22
Speaker
Plot and character and all that but what a reviewer referred to it as a modern nightmare And I think in terms of like, you know surrealism Magical realism or even just how you put it about how you have to let it roll over you I mean, I think that sort of description and if you don't want to go too hard into the nightmare I mean, I think the dream like qualities of it are probably the most pronounced
00:04:48
Speaker
element stylistically of what kind of sets the book apart in a way because you're right it isn't like it is like she's doing a ton of pyrotechnics in her prose or anything like that she's very willfully I think and deliberately keeping you in the dark about
00:05:09
Speaker
a lot and a lot of what the character Nadia does know but doesn't want to say or at least admit. But yeah, it's there is an atmosphere to this novel that is really something remarkable. And I could totally see that being very unsettling for a lot of folks entering into a book group discussion. Yeah, I think that one of the
00:05:34
Speaker
One of the recurring motifs of this particular book is Nadia's lack of clarity.
Character Dynamics and Hostility
00:05:43
Speaker
There's an awful lot of fog. They're living in Bordeaux in France, and it seems like every day is foggy. Perhaps that's the way it is in Bordeaux. I, unfortunately, have never been to Bordeaux.
00:05:56
Speaker
I do like their wine though. Or fortunately, because if it is in fact the Bordeaux that's described in this novel, I don't know that I want to go there.
00:06:06
Speaker
But exactly, but not only is there fog, but she's always messing with her glasses. There's always this kind of, you know, her glasses are uncrooked, they're screwed up. She doesn't have them on, now she has them on. She sees, she can't see very well. So this lack of clarity
00:06:30
Speaker
is definitely a theme, but also there's this moral, I don't know, do I want to say ambiguity? Not even really that ambiguous, although it is kind of interesting, I think, the way that Indié kind of starts out at the very beginning of the novel with the
00:06:59
Speaker
narrator Nadia and her husband, Angé, both of whom are school teachers at the local school and they're walking home together from school and
00:07:14
Speaker
They're just people are reacting to them in a very hostile and suspicious manner, almost in a in a resentful or violent way. And so you see at first, my reaction as a reader is like, oh, this is horrible. What's wrong with this community? Why are they being so nasty to this couple? But then as you get further and further on,
00:07:41
Speaker
you begin to see like, oh, this couple, they're really nasty. I mean, they're horrible people. Not that that means that the community is justified in some of the horrible things that we perceive that they've done to this couple, but these are not nice people generally.
00:08:02
Speaker
No, actually, on the topic, just circling back to the descriptions of Burdo, there's a really short paragraph, page 42, if you have your copy, that I just think, I mean, this is what I think is so impressive of how she writes. But the street is completely dark, no light shining at any window. Every few yards, the pale, silvery gleam of the street lights illuminates the falling grain. So fine, it can only be seen inside that halo.
00:08:30
Speaker
And that just really tight paragraph, she sets up sort of the foreboding nature of it, that there are no lights in any window, that it's rainy, that there's just this noirish quality to it, but it's noir tinged with, again, I don't know, a nightmare, or at least like some more of the foreboding side of noir.
00:08:53
Speaker
And Nadia and Angé's experience at this start really does reflect, and throughout, quite frankly, really does reflect
Plot Surrealism and Symbolism
00:09:00
Speaker
that. It does reflect that notion of like a dark foreboding and uncertainty as to why, why suddenly they're being treated the way they are after having been part of the community for as long as they have and respect it. Or at least that's how Nadia views things at the outset. And as you say,
00:09:19
Speaker
through mostly through her own thoughts and her own reflections on how people are reacting, what they're saying to her, she kind of reveals more and more that they are really, yeah, not very nice people, really quite terrible. And that in particular, there's a period in the novel where it seems more like Angé is perhaps the lead in the duo, but and maybe
00:09:44
Speaker
He remains a not very pleasant figure in all so many respects but Nadia's culpability in it and in some ways what she brings out of him seems to really start to take center stage especially in the last third where
00:09:58
Speaker
And then, frankly, when she leaves his side, it becomes even clearer who she is, what she is as a person, and how that is being reflected and how that's playing out in everyone around her and how they see and view and react to her. But that's also where I think the novel goes even further into the surrealist elements. It really starts to take some turns the moment that she leaves, the moment she leaves Bordeaux.
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, just to mention, and I'm embarrassed. I didn't know this before I looked it up to check the pronunciation, but Angers means Angel in French. I never took French classes. I was a Russian major and was afraid to touch any other languages because I was like,
00:10:44
Speaker
If I can ever master Russian, which I never did too terribly well, then I don't want to confuse myself with other languages, which is probably a stupid attitude to take. But yeah, it's interesting that his name is Angel, and he's very far from an angel. But you're right, I think, in that the further on you go in the book, his badness kind of
00:11:08
Speaker
kind of pales in comparison to his wife's. Another thing just to note off the top is that I think that there is, and it's never, or it's not very explicit, maybe a few little bits, but
00:11:26
Speaker
I feel throughout this whole book that there is kind of a racist menace here and perhaps what she's kind of trying to trying to show us here is some of the ways that if you are
00:11:47
Speaker
a dark person living in a majority white world, there are all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways that people react to you that are threatening, even if they're not an explicit threat.
00:12:07
Speaker
At the very start of the novel, I frankly rather assumed that both Angé and Nadia were black. The way the novel works, there's a lot of coding in there for, and a ton of work put in on physical appearance, especially Nadia's. Throughout the novel, Nadia gains weight and it becomes, you know, ever more remarked upon her cart, like over the course of a few days, or at least
00:12:34
Speaker
that's sort of the sense the novel gives. A cardigan she wears just stops fitting. She like goes to being able to fully button it up to only, you know, and it's a little tight to only a few buttons. So now she can't even button it at all. So now it has to go around her waist. And that even starts to move into an even stronger, especially in the last third of the novel, body horror component to it with something very explicitly demonic taking place inside of her body.
00:13:03
Speaker
But about the halfway point, it became very clear to me that at the very least, Angé is not black. But that's also the same moment where Nadia's granddaughter's name starts to appear and that she has a very hard time that the granddaughter's name is Suhar.
Identity Struggles and Family Dynamics
00:13:21
Speaker
And that's, at least for me, the moment where I'm like, oh, she might be passing. And Nadia's relationship to her son and her ex-husband and her past, her family, is really where I think you start to see the
00:13:37
Speaker
wrought at the core of her personality. Up to this point there's been some discussion of educational philosophy that Angé has that she doesn't really like very much but she goes along with that is frankly like obscene in terms of how it views school teachers, how it views students, and the like. But
00:13:59
Speaker
I don't know, there's a philosophical consistency there that seems like it's just, frankly, it strikes as right wing. Her rejection of her family and her past and who she is seems like it's the wound that's putrefying from the inside out with Nadia and the one that she can't escape from.
00:14:24
Speaker
Should we go a little bit into some of the plot? I mean, we're covering quite a bit of it in this conversation, and maybe we should get a little bit more explicit about how it flows. Yeah, maybe because of the putrefaction, especially, issue that you just brought up, I think one of the first scenes that we get of this putrefaction, this rotting,
00:14:49
Speaker
is in the opening scene. So we talked about how the book opens when Nadia and Angé are leaving their joint workplace, the school, and they're walking home. And Nadia notices that Angé is struggling to keep up with her. And this she's noticing along with noticing the hostile stares of people that they're passing and
00:15:17
Speaker
people not wanting to make eye contact with them or if they do, like sneering at them. And when they finally get to their apartment and she opens the door, Angé kind of
00:15:31
Speaker
partially collapses and it turns out that he has been stabbed in some way with some kind of instrument like around the area of his liver and he's bleeding quite profusely.
Neighborly Dynamics and Supernatural Elements
00:15:49
Speaker
And weirdly, he goes into the bedroom and no one even tries to clean his wounds for, I think, at least 48 hours. So as you can imagine, by the time that Nadia does think about, well, we should clean him up. I thought that his adult daughters who came over to see him would have done that. Well, I went to the pharmacy.
00:16:17
Speaker
to buy some bandages and some alcohol, but turns out that they didn't and she pulls back the sheets on the bed that he's lying on, their bed, and this horrible smell arises and his wound is all black and
00:16:38
Speaker
and that scene of this ever rotting wound in Anje's side just kind of just progresses and gets a little more vivid and worse as the book goes on. And I think one of the things that's quite interesting is that
00:17:08
Speaker
Angé, everyone thinks that Angé is going to die from this wound because it seems so very severe and he's refusing medical help. And a neighbor that they have been very disdainful of, this is kind of a humorous thing, I think. Maybe it's not meant to be humorous, but there's a downstairs neighbor that when they have to enter into their apartment building, they always pass by his apartment and he's a retired gentleman.
00:17:37
Speaker
ends up being a retired school teacher. And they don't really know him, but they disdain him and they don't respect him. And part of the reason seems to be that he is retired. And there's a lot of discussion in the first 20 or 25 pages of the book that we just can't abide by someone who would
00:18:03
Speaker
give up the passion of their vocation and just retire. It just seems unworthy and indecent.
00:18:16
Speaker
Mr. Noget, and he kind of comes to their aid. He knows somehow what has happened to Noget, and he says, I'm here to help, and I know that you guys have been awful toward me, but I want you to know that I'm going to be here for you always.
00:18:42
Speaker
And I'm going to help. So he kind of moves into their place, so to speak. And one of the other kind of really interesting elements and also kind of humorous is that as the book progresses, we've got Angé a bed bound with this ever worsening rotting wound. We have Nadia just kind of obsessed in her own paranoid
00:19:10
Speaker
kind of world trying to figure out why she deserves to be rude and indignant to Mr. Nozze and can't understand why Angé is now kind of being nice to him. But one of the things that Nozze does is he starts making all of these really rich
00:19:32
Speaker
caloric heavy meals for both Angé and Nadia and the depictions of their gluttony during this time and they're like wanting to eat all this rich food and ability to eat all this rich food when it appears that someone
00:19:51
Speaker
one of them is dying of this festering, pus filled, infected, deep wound is just kind of it's, I guess you would say it's, it's definitely the body horror thing. Yeah. And as, as Noje is feeding them, Nadia puts on weight and weight at what eventually takes on supernatural qualities and its speed.
00:20:16
Speaker
But, um, Andre keeps getting thinner, like, and he's, he's not defecating. He's not urinating. He's being fed all this, all of this rich food. And, and no Jay goes to some pains to explain like the sourcing of the materials of the food that, and they're coming, it's coming from.
00:20:35
Speaker
all over France, like the butters from Normandy and the cheese is from somewhere else. And I make my own croissants and my own bread. I wake up an hour early every morning to make sure I have it, which I think has some political racial overtones to it, quite frankly.
00:20:59
Speaker
But yeah, it's it's but but so as all this food is like going into Anje like it's only coming out via the wound via via the pussing of the wound and Nadia is there's this incredible inconsistent. It's interesting that the back half back third of the novel while much more in the
00:21:19
Speaker
the feeling of almost a supernatural nightmarish mode is in some ways a little bit more logically consistent in terms of motivations and decisions and actions. Nadia is moving in a single direction. The people around her are following suit. Everyone has a thing they're doing, and they're not constantly changing their mind or backtracking and cutting against a previous thought or a previous action.
00:21:44
Speaker
in this period in the apartment with Noget and Angé, and maybe that's a bit of a sound wordplay going on there as well between those two names, Nadia can go from one moment, you know, being very pleased with
00:22:00
Speaker
what Noget is offering them. And then the very next sentence, just decrying him and decrying his presence there, she'll whisper in Noget's ear, are you afraid of him? And Noget will thunder at her as much as he can thunder. You know, how could you think that he's doing keeping me alive? In the very next scene, he asked her not to leave him alone with Noget. Like, it's just this constant wrong footing of
00:22:25
Speaker
of Nadia of the reader that really kind of, I mean, it emphasizes the atmosphere and the kind of claustrophobia that the city wrapped in this fog really seems to have, especially for Nadia, she's trying to navigate it. I mean, the very city streets change on her. She ends up in places that she shouldn't be able to end up walking down the street she's walking down, or the street ends up being miles long when her memory of it is that it's only a mile.
00:22:55
Speaker
Which also plays into this notion of ownership of the city on Jay is from there he grew up in the old town she comes out is from a housing project in the suburbs but she spends a lot of time talking about how well she knows the city i walked everywhere and then find yourself lost all the time in the city.
00:23:16
Speaker
It's interesting, I think, too, that this notion, at least my interpretation, is that this this food that Nozze is preparing, and we do get some opulent detail of the dishes that he's making. And I'll just note as an aside that, and I also has a book called The Chef that Two Lines Press published, and it's
00:23:42
Speaker
It's very good as well, but if you like these kind of depictions of food without the pus-filled wound next door, you'll like that book too because she definitely has a very good ear and, I guess, hand for writing about food and rich French food in particular.
00:24:06
Speaker
But yeah, this food is not nourishing them. It's actually corrupting them, I think. When we start out, Angé and Nadia, at least we're led to believe from Nadia's perspective, that they're pretty simpatico and they've lived quite a nice existence together. They both really value their jobs as teachers and they
00:24:34
Speaker
They kind of have the same habits and just kind of a rather smooth way of life before this kind of community hostility seems to invade their lives. But it almost feels like Nergé, through his presence and through his food, is driving a wedge between them.
Horror and Surreal Atmosphere
00:25:01
Speaker
Certainly, if you think about what happens, as you said in the last third of the book, when the obesity on Nadia's part ends up being, you know, almost maybe literally a demonic possession, it does it does feel like she's that he's corrupted her in some way, I think through the food. Well,
00:25:24
Speaker
But at the same time, Angé does appear at the end of the novel. She assumed he was dead, but he's there, and he's healthy, and he's thin, and he just has a scar, like a pink scar from where the attack took place. I also just want to quickly add that when she finally sees the wound,
00:25:47
Speaker
It isn't just like he was stabbed. They gouged his flesh out. Whatever the attack was, there's a savagery and almost a bestial nature to it where she wonders at what kind of tool could even have been used for that. I think that gouging, that attempt to remove flesh and then him progressively losing more flesh as he's fed all this rich French food,
00:26:14
Speaker
I don't know enough about French politics and French literary culture and all that, but I think some things are perhaps being stated about, I don't know. I mean, there's also an element to Nozze of inserting himself into their lives, while also saying that he was a school teacher, which Nadia very much doubts. But everyone that she mentions him to,
00:26:37
Speaker
knows who he is. And he's very famous. He's very respected. And there's an awe like the idea that he is the one taking care of them.
00:26:49
Speaker
simultaneously means that they're in good hands, but at the same time, maybe not. Nadi at one point visits her son's former lover, who is a high ranking official slash policeman, sort of. I mean, that isn't made totally clear to me. I mean, he's certainly a civil servant of some kind, but there did seem to be some kind of police powers associated with it. But when she mentions that Noget is the one taking care of her, taking care of them, Lantan, or Lantan,
00:27:18
Speaker
goes oh wait uh robert victor noje like nose's full name is like wow i think
00:27:25
Speaker
Well, then that should be all right then. And I don't think I actually noted it to quickly refer to it, but she makes some questions like, oh, then we're going to be okay. And he almost basically says, why didn't say that? It's like more that if Noje is involved, no one else is going to get involved, but that doesn't mean this is going to turn out well for you in a way it doesn't.
00:27:49
Speaker
She okay so eventually Nadia leaves she abandons on jay to know jay and she decides that she's going to go see go and live with her son that she needs to get away and that once on jay she keeps saying that once on jays healthy enough she'll send for him and he'll travel and this is how we'll do it.
00:28:08
Speaker
And she takes this nightmare trip to get to Tulan where her son is now living. And she has not seen her son in years. Her son was in a relationship with Luntan, broke it off.
00:28:23
Speaker
mostly because Nadia's ex-husband disapproved of their son being in a homosexual relationship and has now married a woman named Yasmin and has a daughter named Suhar that she's never met. She's never met the wife. She's never met the granddaughter. Her son lives far away. And when she eventually gets to
00:28:47
Speaker
to her son, he's with a completely different person, a woman named Wilma, whom he mentioned in a letter that he sent to her, kind of letting her know that, well, Noget lets the son know in advance of what her plans are. There's so many weird sort of, I keep using the word supernatural, but yeah, like, but like, interventions that Noget is capable of that, that just sort of take place throughout that really throw this into
00:29:16
Speaker
a very bizarre landscape of a novel. So as I said, she left, she goes to Chuan, we'll get a little bit into what takes place with her son. But towards the very end of the novel, Noje appears again. She briefly speaks to him on the phone, but then he's in this village where
00:29:34
Speaker
where the son lives and he's getting a lecture at the school. And when she goes to the lecture and talks to him and gets, you know, under the auspices of getting a book signed, and this has got to be the creepiest book signing moment I've ever heard of her encountered.
00:29:50
Speaker
He leans forward to her during their conversation and says, did you give birth to the thing I put inside of you? And she says, no, absolutely not. And we later find out that she sort of sort of did after a fashion. But, um, wow, what a, what a.
Allegorical Interpretations
00:30:07
Speaker
What a fascinating character she created in Noje. I mean, there are so many different ways that I think, and this is one of the strengths of this novel, there are so many ways that you can take it. Allegory doesn't really quite cover it. There's so much happening and so many layers to what she's discussing that, yeah, I get why you chose it as a book group discussion title, but
00:30:34
Speaker
You almost killed that group, Laurie. I mean, I could see a lot of people not coming back after this one.
00:30:40
Speaker
It was rough and it was soon after we opened. And I really, our book club is going and blowing now. And I can't say that we don't read some funky things because we do. And it makes me really happy that the group of 30 or 35 people that we regularly have every month is really open to reading unusual and unknown literature.
00:31:05
Speaker
and a lot of things in translation. But yeah, this one, it was not a smart move for me to have made the first six months of the store being open because people were like, WTF? What is this about? And what's this book club going to be like? But getting back to your point,
00:31:25
Speaker
about Noget putting this demon thing in Nadia that she gives birth to. Again, I'm wondering whether Angé is the angel, although he's not at what you would think of as the pure, innocent white angel. Angé turns out to be quite racist, too. There's the scene with the Chinese neighbor.
00:31:51
Speaker
Noget might be the devil and he is he is tempting them
00:32:00
Speaker
with all of this rich food and their sin is the gluttony that they are just like ingesting this food like as fast as he can make it and and now they now Nadia ultimately is you know she she's like the this the sin becomes comes to fruition becomes a thing that she has to
00:32:24
Speaker
expel from her body. It turns out, I don't know what it is. The description is like some black slimy thing that she expelled and it's scattered across the floor. Yeah. Describe it as it could look like an eel, but it may also have fur. So some sort of like demon platypus in a way is what it almost sounds like, quite frankly.
00:32:50
Speaker
But if Nozier is the devil, then Wilma, I think, is the devil-truss or the female devil to me. And just to back up in case people are losing the thread, Wilma is the woman who Nadia's son, Ralph, is now living with.
00:33:15
Speaker
She's not the mother of Ralph's child, but she's a OB-GYN, appropriately, whom Ralph, who's also a doctor, is living with. And to me, she seems like a vampire. She's like a vampress. She only eats meat.
00:33:34
Speaker
She's gotten Ralph obsessed with guns and hunting. And there's these animal pelts all over her house. And it appears that she doesn't sleep. There's a point where Naughty is in so much pain that she goes in the middle of the night and knocks on Wilma's, Wilma and Ralph's door. And Wilma just appears fully dressed and very much awake. And Ralph is like poking his head up from under the sheets, like obviously very much asleep.
00:34:16
Speaker
real sense of beauty to her. But then again, the body when the bodyliness kind of kicks in where she's striking and has this sort of, I don't know, like thin, you know, gamine figure, but very thick caps, like almost too strong. And the way I mean, I was all right, maybe because I was already thinking succubus, demonic, whatever, but
00:34:25
Speaker
I don't know, what did you think of Wilma?
00:34:42
Speaker
The second or third time that Nadia notes the size of the muscles on her legs, I immediately thought like goat legs, like that's what's emerging from underneath. Which is also just a remarkable thing that she pulls off is that without drawing out all the possible connections, they're all woven into the pros, into the descriptions, into
00:35:07
Speaker
into the feel of the book. I mean, it's a really masterfully done, just masterfully done novel.
00:35:30
Speaker
Nadia's time or life with Ralph and Wilma is certainly the part of the novel that has the most overt horror elements to it, I would say. It was definitely leading in that direction in the earlier part, but
00:35:48
Speaker
When they pick her up from the boat, she's already had this very strange journey to get to them, is taken on by a traveling companion who knows that Nadia is one of the outcasts, one of the people that the rest of the world does not treat well.
00:36:07
Speaker
And this is a recurring thing. This is basically what Nadia and Angé are struggling with at the beginning of the novel, is that they are now part of this un-elect, if you will, and they don't know why. And Nadia starts to, as she's the one moving out and around the world, starts to recognize other people as being like her, as being part of this outcast pariah group.
00:36:29
Speaker
But she travels with a woman, Natalie, and they have to take a car to actually make their boat on time. It happens that they're they sit next to each other on the train and happens they're going to the same place. But while they're driving there, and it's unclear if she's actually awake or not, Natalie is driving and Nadia looks over at her and sees a skull staring back at her. I mean, there's almost this Caron travel into the underworld component to it.
00:37:00
Speaker
And then when she finally suggests that maybe she falls back asleep or something along those lines, when she next looks at Natalie and Natalie's back to herself is the young woman again that she was traveling with. But they get off the boat. She can't find Natalie when they're getting off of the boat, but she meets up with Ralph.
00:37:21
Speaker
When Ralph comes up in the earlier portions of the novel, Nadia just sing, in a way, sings his praises. Everything except for the name that he gives the granddaughter. She talks about him as her angel and how much she loved it when he would run to her when she came home and jump onto her and lock his legs around her waist and how she'd have to make a scowly face in order to get him to let go, which as that,
00:37:50
Speaker
memory continues to recur throughout the novel. It becomes clearer and clearer that she hated that he did that and that she would actively try and scare him to get him to let go and to drive him off. She also says that she loved Luntan, his lover,
00:38:05
Speaker
far more than she loved Ralph. And she had no problem with her son being in this relationship, but her ex husband kind of put it, you know, forced it to end. But Ralph visits the ex husband. I mean, Ralph makes it very clear that he despises his mother that she is poison in some way.
00:38:25
Speaker
And he even says at one point that he tells her, Ralph tells his mother that he, you know, that he was cuckold by Nadia because she and Lanton were kind of almost, I don't know that they ever really
00:38:41
Speaker
touched each other in a sexual kind of way, but that they were constantly flirting and they had a very close relationship, which is borne out by when Nadia goes to see Lanton because she needs to get a visa and traveling papers to go see Ralph.
Cultural and Racial Identity
00:39:03
Speaker
But yeah, it's it's not a good relationship that Ralph and Nadia have for sure. And I can't I'm trying. I just I mean, I just read this. I should be able to place this better. But is it Ralph, the one that says that it's Nadia who's killing Angé like that? It's her presence.
00:39:22
Speaker
that her presence is what is corrupting and killing him. And I believe he does this in Wilma's presence because he is a bit different away from Wilma. So as we move into this more
00:39:36
Speaker
House of Horrors component of the novel. They pick her up from the boat, they drive up and it's this beautiful harbor and they start driving and they drive up the side of a mountain and they end up in the shadow of the mountain. Can't see the sea. It's cold. It feels very isolated.
00:40:01
Speaker
Dracula's Council? Absolutely, especially because, especially because the village they live in only has a few other structures. They're living in this. It's the house is described in a way that makes it sound like I don't know, like a Le Corbusier that had all the charm ripped out of it and like just a slab that like, I mean, like a coffin, quite frankly, leaning back into the Dracula and vampiric elements of it.
00:40:27
Speaker
But it's the largest house in the village, and the village only has a few other small gray huts almost is how they're described, and church that from the way it's briefly mentioned, sounds like it's maybe never used any longer. And in this house, there are hunting trophies everywhere. There are masks on the wall, these leather masks that look bizarre.
00:40:53
Speaker
When Nadia travels with Ralph for him to go to the hospital and do his rounds at Wilma's behest, and Nadia notes that Ralph is always supervised, someone is always with him, that Wilma is in some way trying to keep him under her thumb.
00:41:09
Speaker
When they leave, women from the village are there, but they all have the same eye makeup as Wilma. And Ralph mentions that one of the specialties of the village is that they make masks of your loved ones so that they can always be looking at you. And Nadia races back inside and immediately finds two masks. One of a younger woman looking very sad and one of a young child looking brilliantly happy.
00:41:38
Speaker
And of course, you know that this is Yasmine and Suhar represented in some capacity. It is creepy as hell. Like that portion is dark. But Suhar is okay. Suhar is okay.
00:41:53
Speaker
It is through, I think, Nadia's descriptions and her memories of her time with her son that I think we really start to see the cracks in her presentation to the world, that she is this upstanding person. Or even that Angé's reprehensible nature is not just her mimicking it, that she has something rotten at her core as well. Because it also comes out that she told Angé that her parents were dead.
00:42:21
Speaker
And they're not they this is where you really start to see that she is trying to hide something about herself that she is running away from something and that the cuckolding that you mentioned that Ralph accuses her of when it comes to London, I mean, it's also made very clear that she
00:42:39
Speaker
pursued Angé that she saw him as the next step up, another step away from who she was. Her ex-husband grew up with her. She knew him from the suburb that they lived in. And so this was her way of cutting that part of her life out even further.
00:42:59
Speaker
Yeah, and her husband, her ex husband, I think was a who is Ralph's dad was a electrician, I think he's definitely blue collar. Yes, very much so. And she even when she goes back, I mean, and she screwed this guy in the divorce, like she
00:43:14
Speaker
She made she got the right lawyer to make it seem as though he was the cause for the failure of the marriage. She got she was getting alimony from him. She got control of the apartment that they lived in and now became solely hers. But he still lives there but hasn't paying her rent in a while when she goes to visit him at this apartment.
00:43:32
Speaker
like the words proletarian to describe his aesthetic come out. And it's just like you really start to see as the social circles expand for who Nadia is interacting with, you get a real sense for the nasty piece of work she happens to be as well. So she's cut out her parents. She hasn't seen them in 35 years.
00:43:53
Speaker
And when she goes on these rounds with Ralph, she encounters Natalie, the woman she traveled with again, but she also takes off. And as she's walking through the village, she hears a voice singing a nursery rhyme. And she can't believe what the voice sounds like because it sounds like her mother. And it sounds like her mother singing in that language that
00:44:17
Speaker
Nadia no longer knows, but she obviously knows it well enough to know the rhyme and know what's going on, but she claims not to really be able to understand it any longer. And this freaks her out. And there's always this constant need for her to use the bathroom, which is setting up whether she's pregnant or not. Again, we're going to have the body horror there. She finds her way into a bar, and in the bar, she can hear men speaking, again, that language, and she hears a distinct voice laughing and knows that it's her father.
00:44:47
Speaker
And as she wanders back up the hill after using the toilet, she goes by the house where she heard the nursery rhyme from, looks in and she sees her parents. She sees a toddler and she sees Ralph feeding the toddler. Um, and Ralph looks at her and is briefly smiling cause he's clearly with his daughter and then is shocked and angry that his mother has found out this secret.
00:45:17
Speaker
So do you think and I couldn't find this town that Ralph is supposed to live in and I guess the parents now do too because Ralph has brought them has paid for them to come.
00:45:33
Speaker
live near him, but not in his weird house with Wilma, which is probably a good thing. But do you think it's Galicia or I couldn't quite gather, I know that they had to take a boat to get there from Bordeaux.
00:45:49
Speaker
I know it's like you have to travel up into the mountains. I wasn't quite sure though with this other language and what that might signify or maybe I'm looking too much for a factual basis in it.
00:46:04
Speaker
I did look up the name Suhar and it is primarily used in Morocco, which would make sense given Morocco's proximity to France and connections to France. So I'm almost wondering if it's either a dialect that they're speaking or Arabic.
00:46:24
Speaker
quite frankly and she knows it she knows it well enough to recognize it and probably can remember what a song was from her childhood but claims not to or can't any longer um speak to it though she does
00:46:39
Speaker
She does speak to her parents, though mostly in French, it seems. And this is one of the things, I mean, if they did not nail down that this was Bordeaux or some sort of phantasmagorical version of Bordeaux, it could have been any town anywhere at the opening. And if they hadn't said that she was traveling to Toulon, it could have been anywhere on the coast. And I think in a way, it still could be any city
00:47:07
Speaker
in, you know, in the heart of France or some country, and it could be anywhere on the coast. I mean, I think that's one of the things that India is, some of the fun she's having with it is keeping it, grinding it enough that there are reference points, but also still having her druthers to like, I mean, you could even say that this is, you know, a divine comedy of some kind, right? Or a purgatorial experience. I think I may have made up a word there just then, purgatorial.
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, but maybe it's Sardinia. Sardinia is a big enough island in mountainous that you could get an amazing harbor and then a cold mountain climate.
00:47:50
Speaker
This again is a recurrent theme and one that's especially pronounced in La Divine where you've got a woman who's ashamed of her background and tries to do everything she can to reject it and to ignore and more than ignore to push aside and negate her
00:48:18
Speaker
humble roots, who's trying to be something more cultured, more cosmopolitan than where she came from, but still can't... I guess there are lots of examples of this in literature where people try to block out who their parents were, who their family was, or where they came from, but it always seems to come back to bite them.
00:49:03
Speaker
I don't know, in some ways, I feel like the issue for Nadia, that she's cut out a part of herself. And there are descriptions of her early marriage with Angé, where it seems like they're enjoying life. They're out on the water. They're driving around. But then their later life and the more recent life,
00:49:07
Speaker
in the end.
00:49:28
Speaker
They laugh at people who buy expensive cars. The food that Noget feeds them, they would never do for themselves because that seems like an extravagance. They're self-flagellating in a way. And that's 100% what one of the bits of Noget's philosophy of teaching that comes out and comes through is that there should be a sense of self-denial for teachers. He has this line
00:49:57
Speaker
where it says like, teachers should know there was always something else they could have done that maybe they would have loved more. But teaching was what they chose to do this, which is a really like, almost fascist sensibility of like subject, subjugating oneself to the needs of the civil of the state of the glory of being a civil servant at the cost of everything that you love. It's like, my God,
00:50:22
Speaker
But again, that doesn't really match up with how they were initially and perhaps even attracted Nadia to him. I think it's interesting how, you know, you read this book from beginning to end, and now I've read it three or four times. And I'm still confused. And not in a frustrated way, but in a pleasantly puzzled way.
00:50:47
Speaker
is Nadia just a horribly unreliable narrator. I mean, she's telling us that Angé has a absolutely 100% fatal wound that no one in their right mind should survive and doubly so would not survive without medical treatment, which she apparently never gets and no one ever really takes care of this wound in a hospital or even at home.
00:51:14
Speaker
But he does. He does survive. He's fine in
Societal Hostility and Broader Themes
00:51:17
Speaker
the end. And in fact, he's like, has a new girlfriend, you know, and he's happy, like you said, and he's walking on the beach holding hands with her. And or I think both can be true.
00:51:29
Speaker
what is going on here with why this community is suddenly suspicious and hostile towards this pair, Angé and Nadia and other people, as you said, that it becomes apparent that there are these group of outcasts. And I'm probably grasping at straws here, but this book was published in France in 2007, and it
00:51:59
Speaker
It calls me to wonder whether there isn't some unmentioned event that's happened, maybe like a 9-11, where suddenly everyone that looks a little darker or maybe looks Arab or from an Arab or Middle Eastern place,
00:52:23
Speaker
is now suddenly under suspicion or people are untrusting of them or just have an uneasy feeling to them around them that's totally unjustified but that something big has happened to cause the community to kind of view these otherwise pretty innocuous people as a threat.
00:52:51
Speaker
I mean, so to your first point about both being true, I think all of it can be true. I mean, I think this could be an unreliable narrator. I think this could be someone suffering an extreme mental crisis. I think it could be she fell into a dystopia without realizing that she was walking through a wormhole. It could be a tale of demonic possession. I think that's one of the absolute strengths of this novel is I think no matter how many times you read it,
00:53:17
Speaker
a new interpretation will present itself and will be as valid as the previous ones or the ones that are competing right alongside of it. And I think that's a really hard thing to pull off that she absolutely crushed here. It makes me very excited to check out her other work because this is the first one, first novel of hers that I've read.
00:53:40
Speaker
But as far as its placement in French history, French politics, I mean, France is a multicultural society that, I mean, I'm by no means an expert on French politics or culture, but I mean, it strikes me that there are consistent flashpoints in terms of
00:54:03
Speaker
what it means to be French, assimilation versus integration, casting aside one's identity in order to be truly French. For the love of God, the national front continues to pull well in French presidential elections and even in some other municipal elections. And I think I saw
00:54:26
Speaker
that a far-right candidate won election in her hometown not long before this book came out.
00:54:38
Speaker
I think, in some ways, she is pulling at a lot of the competing claims within French society. I mean, I think that that's also why, I mean, Angé being as racist as he is, and in some ways, and maybe perhaps fascistic in his political beliefs, is married to a woman who's clearly of North African descent, you know? I mean, that's a competing claim there. I think a lot of that is part of it and is what is
00:55:08
Speaker
Yeah, striving with all the other elements of the novel to really kind of stake their claim and it could it could also just be that just this idea of all these ideas all of these notions all of these
00:55:24
Speaker
all this pressure trying to find its release point all at the same time and that creating a real pressure cooker. But also just on the topic of pariah status, I think that's just that unfortunately that's true of most societies and especially Western societies that there's always
00:55:46
Speaker
There's always a group, there are always people who are somehow on the outside and frequently there is a moment or there are moments where a community will simply decide that one element of that group or one group really shouldn't be visible any longer. And either they're made to stick to the corners or
00:56:09
Speaker
as happens a few times in this novel where someone simply doesn't see Nadia, like the conductor in the train doesn't ask for her ticket. It's as if she's not there. So complete has been her removal from society that some folks can't even see her any longer. Yeah. And she also sees herself. There's a there's a scene where I think this is when she's still in Bordeaux and she goes up to a newsstand and the woman that's working at the counter on the newsstand
00:56:38
Speaker
she thinks looks exactly like her and she doesn't want to be seen because she's afraid of the reaction of people on the street that would see her standing in such close proximity to someone that looks like her. I think your point about assimilation is right on. It's this horrible struggle that's going on within Nadia of
00:57:02
Speaker
of totally rejecting who she is and trying so hard to assimilate that it just goes to illogical places like not being able to say her granddaughter's name, Suhar, and not having any communication with her parents for 35 years.
Nadia's Transformation and Acceptance
00:57:22
Speaker
It's just
00:57:23
Speaker
And there's – I mean, at the end of the novel, after she has that last encounter with Noget and he asks about the thing that he put inside of her, she does describe, as we already did, when she's undressing one night and this thing slithers out of her. And at this point, Nadia is no longer obese or as obese.
00:57:43
Speaker
But she describes the food that she's eating, because at this time, she is living with her parents and her granddaughter and sees Ralph when he comes in for his rounds. And I mean, her mother even tells her that Wilma got rid of Yasmine and that she shouldn't stay there and don't eat any of the meat that's up there, which just like, my Jesus Christ.
00:58:13
Speaker
Can we just throw some cannibalism in there? Although I guess if you're not actually human, it's not cannibalism, but what the hell? But the food that she is eating with her parents is described as semolina, grilled fish. It sounds like a very light Mediterranean dish. Clean, clean. Clean, clean.
00:58:43
Speaker
I think it would be a misreading to suggest that it's saying she should have stayed in her part of
00:58:51
Speaker
stayed with her culture, whatever. I think this is more her just reestablishing a connection to her family, where she comes from, and no longer as she does throughout. But throughout the novel, she refers when Suhar's name comes up, she refers to it as the stain of her bloodline. And it's removing this notion that her bloodline is in any way stained, that there's anything wrong with the people that bore her and the community that she came up
Book's Complexity and Interpretations
00:59:20
Speaker
in.
00:59:20
Speaker
Yeah. Well, can I ask? I think you like the book, right? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's incredible. I mean, it's really good. It's also one of the weirdest things I've read in quite a long time, which I appreciated. I'll also say it's the kind of book
00:59:39
Speaker
I think the opening 50 pages are the hardest to get through because you're just getting your footing and the atmosphere is so oppressive. But once you get past that point, it really hits its stride and just moves. There's movement there that's really...
00:59:59
Speaker
Well, frankly, essential because it gets so strange in parts that it'd be an easy book to put down and maybe walk away from for quite some time. But it's really brilliant. I'm actually curious to read some more reviews and some more of the criticism around it because I do think that there's probably quite a bit there.
01:00:18
Speaker
That's also the kind of thing you don't have to. Like I said, like we've been saying this whole time, there's so many competing interpretations here, but there should
Comparative Literature and Themes
01:00:28
Speaker
be. That's one of the strengths of this novel. And what do you think about books that seem to you to have a similar resonance? Yeah, comps on this one.
01:00:43
Speaker
Also, just in terms of how the sausage gets made, this is the first backlist title that we've done a recording for in almost a month. So I feel almost rusty trying to come up with that. But I certainly think that there are Kafka-esque qualities to it, especially in the opening, the sense of
01:01:07
Speaker
oppressiveness of the town, oppressiveness of the state, that's certainly there. I think Avilio Rosero's The Armies kind of works with this one a little bit, very different books, but I mean, The Armies is, I would argue, a descend into hell, like a movement, like
01:01:25
Speaker
a reverse divine comedy from a paradise to an inferno. I don't think this is quite doing that, but certainly that sense of society unraveling or how easy it is to be discarded from it and for forces from the outside to really rip things apart. I think that's certainly there. The Taiga Syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza. I think it has a similar mood to it. And then just in terms of like, I don't know,
01:01:53
Speaker
body horror ish slash house horror. You should have left by Danielle Killman. And really, I thought that even before she got to the house, that Wilma and Ralph's house at the end, and that house could 100% be the house out of that novella. Fully capable of trapping you within its walls if it's so desired. Yeah, those kind of jump out at me a bit. How about how about for you?
01:02:17
Speaker
I definitely had the Kafkaesque vibes as well, for sure. Two, though, that come to mind for me. One, I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, because it's a book that I absolutely love. It's an open letter title.
01:02:32
Speaker
The Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoza. That has a lot of the same kind of weight. Is this grotesque, perverse, weird stuff actually happening or not?
01:02:54
Speaker
And then another one that comes to mind is the novel Ahut, which Tin House reissued, I don't know, maybe three or four years ago. It's by a South African author, Marlene Van Nkirk, totally awesome novel, and has a lot of similar, I guess, body horror elements and
01:03:24
Speaker
kind of a claustrophobic kind of atmosphere in terms of, you know, you're kind of captive in this narrow little world that you've unconsciously or inadvertently created yourself or created yourself.
01:03:46
Speaker
So the walls just kind of keep feeling like they're coming in, um, fingertip walls on your life. And there's some nasty characters in a hot too that, um, I wouldn't necessarily, um, want to try to make friends with. So yeah, I think those are, those are the two that come to mind for
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
01:04:07
Speaker
me. Any final words on this one?
01:04:09
Speaker
It's a phenomenal novel. I really think folks should absolutely check this one out. I mean, I sometimes think that we are doing a subconscious or maybe more conscious job of picking things that speak a little bit to our times. But I also think that good literature simply does that, that it contains all the blueprints you need to apply it to whatever might be going on in the world at any given time.
01:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, this this is just this is just a really fascinating, brilliantly written. And yeah, it's just a stunning novel. I'm really I'm very glad you you suggested this one. Well, and I'm I'm excited and happy that you're you're wanting to check out more of her titles, because I think that pretty much everything she does is brilliant. So she's she's well worth looking into, whether it be this book or one of our others. All right. Well, thanks very much, Laurie. Thank you, Tom.
01:05:11
Speaker
you