Self-Portrait in Green

by Marie NDiaye, Jordan Stump (Translator)

Overview

Who are the green women? They are powerful (one is a disciplinarian teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost). They are seductive (one marries her best friend’s father). And they are unbearably personal (one is the author’s own mother).

They are all aspects of their creator: Marie NDiaye, an author celebrated worldwide as one of France’s leading writers. Here, in her own skewed take on the memoir, NDiaye combs through all the menacing, beguiling, and revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, and unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, and how those obsessions become us.

This 10^th anniversary hardcover edition of Marie NDiaye’s genre-defying classic restores photographs that appeared in the original French edition alongside Jordan Stump’s dazzling translation, revealing in English, at last, the complete vision of NDiaye’s influential masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641639
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	614,822
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Marie NDiaye met her father for the first time at age 15, two years before publishing her first novel. She is the recipient of the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, the latter being highest honor a French writer can receive. One of ten finalists for the 2013 International Booker Prize, alongside Lydia Davis and Marilynne Robinson, she is the author of over a dozen plays and works of prose. Jordan Stump is a two-time nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. One of the leading translators of innovative French literature, he has translated books by Nobel laureate Claude Simon, plus Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Eric Chevillard, and Jules Verne’s French-language novel The Mysterious Island.

Editorial Reviews

Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement.” —The New York Review of Books


“One of the most mysterious, spectral, appealing and uncategorizable books I've ever read.” —Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night



“This novel not only seems to change each time I return to it, but also to shape-shift during the act of reading. An adult woman with young children, the narrator is at once detached from and vividly connected to her surroundings, never more so when encountering one of the ‘women in green’ that haunt her past, present and future. The women in green are a slippery, diffuse category—beautiful, glamorous, dangerous—which the narrator is both afraid of and bewitched by.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

"Marie NDiaye's Self Portrait in Green is phenomenal." —Idra Novey, author of Ways of Disappearing

"NDiaye’s two early books, All My Friends and Self-Portrait in Green . . . are so extraordinarily vivid and controlled" —The New Republic

"[C]ompelling and tightly written. . . . Rather like a Francis Bacon triptych, there is nothing fixed, comforting or coherent about the narrator’s identity or idea of herself, but the image she projects is incredibly vivid. . . . [NDiaye's] prose reads effortlessly in Jordan Stump’s fine translation." —Times Literary Supplement

“Self-Portrait in Green is a sort of malicious reverie where the real mingles with the imagined, the living with the dead, the water with the land.” —The Express (Paris)

“It’s a book that, once read, leaves you wondering what to think about it . . . knowing . . . you had a thought-provoking evening.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[W]ades through feminine fear, power, and insecurity like no other book I’ve encountered.” —Flavorwire

""[A]n exploration of the sources of fiction and the way that fiction and memoir mix . . . a representation of the artist’s mind, questions, anxieties, pleasures, and all." —Necessary Fiction

"Marie NDiaye has created a tiny, psychological masterpiece with her Self-Portrait in Green." —Three Percent

"Self-Portrait in Green is a book that defies easy categorization. . . . In NDiaye’s world, ghosts are not as rare as we might think, nor are they like other ghosts, or as you or I probably imagine [them]." — 3:AM Magazine

From the Publisher