On the first page of Ladivine by French novelist Marie NDiaye (Three Strong Women), readers meet a woman who is and is not named Clarisse Rivière. She grew up as Malinka, the daughter of a black West African single mother, Ladivine Sylla, and an unknown white man. Raised as "the princess" by her devoted, isolated mother, "the servant," Malinka realized early on that she could pass as white. She fled home, made a new life as the "resolutely inoffensive" Clarisse, married Richard Rivière, a white man, and kept him and her mother secret from each other all her life. Like her mother, she devotes herself entirely to her family, but "her voluntary, permanent self-effacement had constructed a thin wall of ice all around her, that sometimes her daughter and husband couldn't understand," and in time she loses them too. Alone, she becomes Malinka again for a short time, with an accepting but dangerously broken lover.
After Clarisse's death, NDiaye switches to the perspective of her grown daughter, Ladivine Rivière, who is struggling to reconcile her parents, her childhood and her young family. On a nightmarish African vacation, she and her husband transform in monstrous and illuminating ways.
NDiaye is a writer of the highest quality, and her work rewards careful reading and rereading. The world of Ladivine is complex and ambiguous; in many ways this is a bleak account of frustrated lives and loves, but it is tempered and graced by NDiaye's vision of beauty and strangeness in the world, the depth and strength of love and a final resolution of recognized truth. --Sara Catterall