Self-Portrait in Green: 10th Anniversary Edition (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
A curious little book, perched somewhere between a memoir and a fragmented, dreamlike piece of fiction. An unidentified narrator leads us unsteadily through a flooded French provincial town, encounters with "green women" whose identities are vague and confused -- some with emerald eyes, others who stand ominously in green grass fields -- each who seem to float somewhere between life and death, the known and the unknown. I found NDiaye's hallucinatory prose (brilliantly translated by Jordan Stump) absolutely mesmerizing, the book never adhering to expectation but soaked through with an eerie intimacy. A beautiful work, one that for all its obliqueness still feels incredibly personal.
— From Bryan
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 10th 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.