I’d never read Marie NDiaye before this. Maybe Vengeance is Mine is a poor entry point — it certainly didn’t leave me eager to continue. The novel follows a Bordeaux lawyer, Maître Susane, as she takes on the defense of a woman accused of killing her three children — a woman who may or may not have ties to Susane’s past. The premise promises psychological weight and emotional ambiguity, but the novel never finds urgency, momentum, or even a clear emotional center.
The narrative floats between memory, fantasy, paranoia, and vague trauma, but instead of deepening the story, the opacity becomes its defining feature. I found myself rereading passages not because they were challenging in an interesting way, but because I couldn’t figure out what had just happened. The book gestures at themes — guilt, class, repression, the slipperiness of identity — but never engages with them in a way that feels grounded.
NDiaye’s style might work better in another context, but here it left me cold. Everything felt blurred: characters, motivations, even the timeline. The stakes, though potentially dramatic, felt weightless. There’s no real build, no tension, no reward for sticking with it. I finished the book mostly out of obligation, not curiosity.
There are moments of striking prose, and a few eerie scenes that suggest what the book could have been. But overall, I found the reading experience alienating — not in the productive way some novels are, but in the frustrating way where nothing lands and nothing matters. Maybe the point is disorientation. If so, mission accomplished. But I can’t say I enjoyed the trip.
