Self-Portrait in Green
Jordan Stump
(Translated by)Description
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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Two Lines Press |
| Publish Date | November 11, 2014 |
| Pages | 120 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781931883399 |
| Dimensions | 7.0 X 4.3 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"One of the most mysterious, spectral, appealing and uncategorizable books I've ever read." --Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night
"This novel not only seems to change each time I return to it, but also to shape-shift during the act of reading. An adult woman with young children, the narrator is at once detached from and vividly connected to her surroundings, never more so when encountering one of the 'women in green' that haunt her past, present and future. The women in green are a slippery, diffuse category--beautiful, glamorous, dangerous--which the narrator is both afraid of and bewitched by." --Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul
"Marie NDiaye's Self Portrait in Green is phenomenal." --Idra Novey, author of Ways of Disappearing
"NDiaye's two early books, All My Friends and Self-Portrait in Green . . . are so extraordinarily vivid and controlled" --The New Republic
"[C]ompelling and tightly written. . . . Rather like a Francis Bacon triptych, there is nothing fixed, comforting or coherent about the narrator's identity or idea of herself, but the image she projects is incredibly vivid. . . . [NDiaye's] prose reads effortlessly in Jordan Stump's fine translation." --Times Literary Supplement
"Self-Portrait in Green is a sort of malicious reverie where the real mingles with the imagined, the living with the dead, the water with the land." --The Express (Paris)
"It's a book that, once read, leaves you wondering what to think about it . . . knowing . . . you had a thought-provoking evening." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"[W]ades through feminine fear, power, and insecurity like no other book I've encountered." --Flavorwire
""[A]n exploration of the sources of fiction and the way that fiction and memoir mix . . . a representation of the artist's mind, questions, anxieties, pleasures, and all." --Necessary Fiction
"Marie NDiaye has created a tiny, psychological masterpiece with her Self-Portrait in Green." --Three Percent
"Self-Portrait in Green is a book that defies easy categorization. . . . In NDiaye's world, ghosts are not as rare as we might think, nor are they like other ghosts, or as you or I probably imagine [them]." -- 3: AM Magazine
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