The Witch
by Marie NDiaye (La Sorcière, 1996)
translated from the French by Jordan Stump
Vintage (2026)
144 pp
Marie NDiaye’s work, which I love, often explores the instability of identity and the way women are asked to accommodate. To do this, she has a way of introducing a seemingly straightforward and grounded story that shifts into the surreal, where the narrator seems to always be trying to keep up while their impression of the world gets radically transformed. Her latest to be translated into English (and also just shortlisted for the International Booker Prize) is no exception.
The Witch begins with our narrator, Lucie, telling us that when her twin daughters turned twelve she initiated them “into the mysterious powers.” Lucie comes from a line of powerful witches, though she herself has always been limited. I love how in the first paragraph NDiaye deflates any sense of wonder. For her daughters, these powers are not a source of awe at all. At best they seem ambivalent, but maybe that’s just how they feel about anything coming from their mom. Lucie says her daughters “no more understood the need to care about it or suddenly somehow master it than they saw the interest in learning to cook the dishes I served them.”
From there, the novel moves in series of disorienting shifts, both for Lucie and the reader. Lucie’s husband is suddenly gone, and the initial confusion she feels at the loss quickly becomes acceptance. Her parents, whose relationship seemed exemplary, separate just as abruptly, and her mother’s new partner appears as an already established fact. The world around Lucie rearranges itself without explanation.
The way NDiaye does this made me think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, where long-established facts seem to materialize out of nowhere, and the narrator is left wondering how they failed to notice what has always been true until they simply move along as if it always were true. NDiaye seems to use this technique to explore a survival mechanism. Lucie has little control over what happens around her, and so each shift is absorbed. All the while she has these powers, but the men in her life in particular prefer to not just ignore them but to insist they aren’t real.
