Ladivine

NDiaye's prose is like no other author that I have read. Their previous book, Three Strong Women tangled three stories together, each with its owb uncanny mood and setting. In Ladivne there are again three stories, those of three generations of women dealing with trauma and issues of (un)belonging in France.

The writing is intricate and unique, and builds a world from the inner perspectives of the characters, who are richly developed. However, the story never really got going for me, and was mostly told in the early chapters before being trundled along for the rest of the book. The depth of character motivation, understanding each person's complex motivations for making the choices that they make, is an amazing experiment in writing, but for me the experiment that doesn't quite pay off for the whole book.