Marie NDiaye’s La Vengeance m’appartient came into my life following a positive review in Karavan (which I’m very var behind in my reading!). I had the good fortune to find it in my top three languages: the original French, and then translations in Swedish and English. I have enough thoughts there that I think they would detract from talking about the novel qua novel, so that’s a separate post.
While Maître Susane has risen from the working class to become a lawyer, she’s not quite the picture of unmitigated success that her friends and family assume her to be. After leaving a larger, much more prestigious firm to start her own practice, Maître Susane has struggled financially, taking on banal cases that only just barely cover her bills. All of this has the potential to change when Gilles Principaux walks into her office and asks her to represent his wife, Marlyne, who is currently awaiting trial for the murder of their three children. This would be an incredibly high profile case and the first major one since Maître Susane started her own practice.
There is a catch, of course. Maître Susane believes to recognize in Gilles a certain influential teenager from her youth. One fateful day, at the age of ten, she accompanied her mother in her work as a cleaning lady, and spent the afternoon in the bedroom of the family’s teenage son. Much of what happened that day is lost down the memory hole, including the name of the family, but Maître Susane firmly believes that whatever it was set her on the path to becoming a lawyer.
What happened that day? Was it Gilles that Maître Susane encountered, or someone else?
Alongside all of this, Maître Susane is also negotiating a complicated relationship with her own cleaning lady (a not insignificant expense that she can barely afford), an undocumented worker from Mauritius named Sharon. Maître Susane is desperate for Sharon’s approval, maybe even her friendship, to the point of growing resentful when her advances are rebuffed. The relationship is only further complicated when Maître Susane volunteers Sharon as a babysitter for her beloved goddaughter Lila.
As Maître Susane prepares Marlyne Principaux’s defense, the rest of her life spins out of control. Her parents, distressed at her renewed fixation on what happened that day in her childhood, eventually cut off contact with her; Sharon reveals that she has been taking Lila with her to other cleaning jobs during the day, including the elderly widow Principaux (perhaps the same Principaux?) and Maître Susane is convinced that the girl is suffering; even her own memory of recent events starts playing tricks on her (or are the people in her life trying to deceive her?).
There is a lot to unpack in this book and quite frankly I don’t think I’m capable of it (writing two weeks or so after I finished reading it). I loved this book and my review cannot do it justice, but I’ll try anyway.
In a way, La Vengeance m’appartient has a lot of the trappings of noir, even though I don’t think it could be strictly classified as such. Psychological thriller? Raymond Chandler once claimed that “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing” and that’s what you get here. None of those seemingly urgent questions in the above summary are answered conclusively; we are presented with a life in turmoil that is only partially resolved by the end of the story. The point is not the meticulously pieced together mystery but rather the externalization of the subtle dramas and tensions of interpersonal relationships. The chaos that Gilles introduces in Maître Susane’s life had really already taken root inside of her long ago. She seeks approval and understanding from everyone—from her parents, from the teenage maybe-Principaux, from her ex (and father of her goddaughter), from Sharon, from Lila—and fails to obtain it anywhere.
Maître Susane is, in the parlance of our times, “hashtag ‘relateable.'” Her ambivalent relationship with her parents—simultaneously yearning to unburden her heart to them while also sensing that they would only be equally ambivalent about such a confession—is a familiar one, likewise her demanding urges with Sharon. On one level Maître Susane is magnanimous and forward thinking with Sharon: she is handling Sharon’s visa case for free, she pays her fairly and on time, she doesn’t have excessive demands in terms of labor. But she also clearly expects to be repaid for these favors with a more personal relationship, thereby crowning her (and here I’m using my own phrasing, not NDiaye’s) a Good Ally TM.
Part of the reason La Vengeance m’appartient might have been such an experience for me was that I read much of it while I was visiting my own parents, so I was already swimming in all those kinds of feelings already. Now that I’m well into adulthood, am I living up to my parents’ expectations for me? Their hopes? Am I even living up to my own? Maître Susane and I are around the same age, after all. There are absolutely biographical reasons that I was so taken with this book. But regardless, NDiaye touches on a lot of contemporary suffering and struggles with a deft, elegant hand.
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