After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents.
After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. Trois femmes puissantes (Gallimard) was already established as a favourite with the reading public. One suspects that the majority of those readers are women, for we are in feminist territory here, and it feels a little old-fashioned.
The three powerful women of the title — Norah, Fanta, Khady Temba — rebel against the circumstances of their lives and are praised for doing so in a style that found favour with the jury, although it reads awkwardly and is deliberately abrupt. The first of the women, Norah, is encumbered with a dilapidated father and an idle lover who has moved into her apartment with this small daughter.
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