She Who Remains by Rene Karabash

  She Who Remains is a book of in-betweens and dualities that begins my journey into reading this year’s shortlist for the International Booker Prize and Rene Karabash touches on something interesting and special. For a book so short, it also offers a surprising number of twists that make it an emotional, enriching experience.

For the power of She Who Remains to land, it requires some cultural context. The book’s conflict is rooted in the Kanun of Lekё Dukagjini, which is a set of informal laws and traditions passed down orally with roots in Northern Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among the practices of Kanun are blood feuds and blood taxes. One example relevant to She Who Remains is that when a woman gets married, her father makes a gift to her husband that includes, among other things, a single bullet—if, on their wedding night, the husband finds his wife to be impure, he uses that bullet to kill her. If you wrong another family, they may send a messenger to initiate a blood feud and they are allowed to kill someone from your family—a short stay of 24 hours, or a long stay of about a month, may be requested, but is rarely provided. After an indeterminate amount of time, you are then able to enact your own revenge. Absolutely critical to She Who Remains, though, is the concept of a “sworn virgin.” According to custom, pure women are able to take the oath to become a sworn virgin. After taking the oath, sworn virgins are then considered men and are afforded the privileges of men that women are not able to access. 

Rene Karabash’s novel explores these concepts structured like a structured collage of pieces. We start with a description of what a sworn virgin is and then Karabash provides a poem about a girl in her mother’s womb hearing her dad praying for a boy and the unborn girl strangling herself with her umbilical cord. The book then provides an excerpt from the Bible recounting Cain’s murder of Abel. Following that, the story ‘begins’ with a flashforward of a man being murdered: the narrator’s father. He is given a courteous greeting before he is shot and killed according to Kanun decrees. Then we flash back to Bejika, the narrator, giving her oath to become a sworn virgin and, by extension, to live as a man, Matija.

I wish there was a simple way to tell this story.

There’s not; it’s a layered, complex remix of moments. There’s a subtle frame narrative at play where Bejika is talking to a journalist (it’s later revealed that Bejika is the last living sworn virgin), but it’s subtle enough that we as audience get to be aligned with the journalist and we get brought along in the misinformation and misremembering of our unreliable narrator.

Karabash’s fragmentary style for the narration plays into some wonderful ambiguity. For instance, after Bejika undertakes the oath, the narration reads: “I exit the change and for the very first time I feel // I walk home” (19). Karabash builds up our expectation for her to express what she feels, but before we hear an actual emotion she cuts off, which makes it seem like it’s the first time she feels anything. There are also moments when it’s unclear who is speaking, aligning them in an interesting and unpredictable way—maybe implicating them together would be the better word choice here.

The plot of the book is finely wrought and elicited from me several gasps. There are phrases and scenes that repeat, and upon their repetition they recontextualize moments in surprising ways. In effect, it meant I got to have my heart broken more than once from the same moment. For example, it has been arranged that Bekija marry a man she is not interested in. She instead takes the sworn virgin oath to escape and it’s heartbreaking because it means that a blood feud will start: the man’s family will seek revenge for the betrothal betrayal. Bejika is given a black armband and she must choose who will wear it and become the target of the murder. Will she give it to her father or her brother? It’s a painful choice, especially because she chooses unexpectedly. She picks her younger brother, whom she’d spent so much time protecting.

The narrative poem at the start of the book, I assumed, was a standalone piece that accompanied the work thematically, but it also seems to parallel, literally, events in the book. Bejika seems to recall from the womb her dad talking about wanting a boy. Indeed, her mother was pregnant with twins but lost her would-be brother. Despite this sorrow for her parents, her father actually seems quite good to her and sees her as the favourite, even after her younger brother is miraculously born. He treats Bejika like a boy and allows her to do things that promote their special bond. When her brother Sále is born, though, there’s a tragic tension to their dynamic. Sále is presented as a tiny menace; we’re given a poem about him crushing walnuts with a rock, “he fills his mouth and leaves no room for another walnut / the walnuts have not yet ripened and they dye his hands black / their green skins shatter under the rock / green water sprays Sále’s legs / darkened his skin where the specks land” (35). He is initially presented as an impatient young man who refuses to wait for walnuts to ripen. There’s something vaguely ominous in the image of him crushing these so indiscriminately and darkening himself. This is also presented alongside the image of Murash (Bejika’s betrothed) popping his head over the fence, and the juxtaposition feels oddly resonant. The daughter Bejika is the golden son and Sále is never boyish enough to be their father’s boy. Bejika even tries to defend him. In one moment, she kills a rabbit and gives the credit to Sále. The boy is publicly praised publicly, briefly, before being horribly reprimanded in private. The unfairness of the family dynamically, tragic as it is, is wrought beautifully, but is all that more painful when Bejika selects her brother as the target for the blood tax her family owes.

But of course, the strength of She Who Remains is in its layering. What initially appears as a preference not to marry the man selected for her is imbued with new significance after the fact. Bejika recounts her rape prior to the wedding. She’s late in milking cows when a man enters:

“I can feel his breath on me, he’s drunk milk before he’s come here, the village whispers that at dusk he enters the goat barn and drinks milk straight from the goats’ teats, there’s other things they say about him but I don’t want to know, Kuka is now right next to me, he stands over me like a stone pillar, I’m a moth, nailed to a brick wall by the pins of his eyes, his eyes don’t glow in the dark because coals glow only when you’ve set them on fire, his eyes are black as though they’ve been gouged out, or the person behind them has been

Kuka, don’t, let go of me” (55).

I find the description powerful—not so much the metaphor of being a moth nailed to a brick wall, but more about is eyes not glowing because they’ve not been set on fire. You can also see what I mean about the dialogue. Without quotation marks, we can infer who is speaking (or maybe thinking). There’s also the critical comma after “don’t” that shows thoughtful craftsmanship over the sentence. It could easily transform into “don’t let go of me” without that comma, but I’m going to let that hang there for a moment. In recounting her rape, Bejika’s thoughts and dialogue are ambiguously presented:

“go play with the other boys on the hill, I saw them on my way here, they’re still
there, playing tipcat, I’ll go home and won’t tell anyone that you were here

I shouldn’t have said that, Kua’s strong arms encircle my waist and we plunge toward the copper milk buckets, we fall and the buckets clang like church bells, the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud, the buckets ring to the beat of the rider, ding ding ding ding then faster ding ding ding ding.” (55)

What might have started in the imagination becomes real; she acknowledges that she said the piece about going to play with the other boys aloud and that it had consequences for her. There’s a haunting “ding ding ding ding” of the buckets, which echoes through the novel, and the scene transforms into one of marriage: “the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud” (55). Evoking the wedding imbues the scene with a deeper, layered terror. You realize that not only has she been raped, but that this rape renders her ‘impure’ for her fiance, who, upon discovering that she is not a virgin, is equipped to kill her. Indeed, Bejika dreams that very scenario on the eve of her oath.

The scene is heartbreaking on multiple levels, and it becomes heartbreaking in a different way later in the book. Outside of the frame narrative, Bejika is receiving letters from her brother Sále. It’s clear from context that she has not replied to him (and only later is it revealed that she didn’t respond because she can’t read). Sále perpetually alludes to some deeper understanding, planting doubts in the reader as to the course of events.

Spoilers to follow.

The scene of the Bejika’s rape that prompted all this sorrow—her brother running away, her father’s murder, her living as a sworn virgin—in fact, is a story she has told the journalist. Sále’s letters allude to the unspoken truth of that night. At several moments, Bejika recounts a childhood friend with whom she read books but then lost contact. She and Dhana were close, so much so that whispers circulated around them—why are they reading books? Was she never taught to read? It’s revealed that those whispers were something more and that is what happened in the barn that night. Seemingly because of the suspicion, Dhana is being taken away and on the eve of her departure she meets Bejika in the barn. Bejika remembers the scene as follows:

“Dhana kisses my eyes, kisses my mouth, then she stops and buries her face in my hair, I’m leaving, I already know what this is, this is the end of the world, I still remember her salty kisses and the small hole in the wall I’d never seen before, when Dhana cried out loud, I’ll find you, the last of the daylight drained away from it, and the moment we left the dairy, eternal night would come for the both of us” (111).

Instead of being a scene of sorrow for the rape of a young girl, the story transforms with the new layer: it’s a story of a forbidden romance, an impossible love between two young girls. This recognition that it’s the end of their world, that this is their final meeting, is imbued with sorrow precisely because it is so close to joy. Throughout the scene and throughout the book, Bejika asks herself “am I dying or being born” and in this scene she asks “am I being born or am I being murdered in her arms” (111). Their love destroys them. For Bejika, this makes her impure; it is her death. Their love is the death of her father. When they part, Bejika touches “where the wet is” and it is wet with blood.

The revelation for the audience is sad, of course, but Karabash continues to layer the sadness. There’s the question of who is at fault in these circumstances. When Sále writes his letters, he alludes to the idea of forgiveness. We assume it is forgiveness for giving him the black armband, and that he is perhaps sorry for running away and leaving their dad to be killed. After Bejika narrates the real events in the dairy, Sále’s letter states that he “had the strong desire to hear the truth directly from you and for us to ask each other for forgiveness, but it seems I’m the one who has to ask for it first” (113). He says how he witnessed everything in the dairy: “You know how much I loved to follow you around, I even trailed you in secret sometimes” (113). He reveals that he peeked through a hole and watched and witnessed the whole thing. He bore witness. The two are bound together in guilt. 

That motif persists throughout the book. Later, it’s revealed that Dhana had written her a letter she couldn’t read. They reunite and the impossibility of their bond is, for a moment, overcome:

“Bekija, the woman who’s come off the bus cries out, the woman who’s headed to where my name means she who lives, she who remains alive, she who has saved herself, Bekija looks to the woman, then to the newborn calf, she cries, she smiles and she cries, the two cry and laugh together, Bekija gets up and goes to embrace the woman, the two stay holding each other for a long time, they say nothing, the calf finds its mother’s teat and begins to suckle noisily, a fly lands on its left ear, the cow keeps licking her child and it is precisely there, by this picture and in this moment that the two women feel immortality, they’ve discovered joy and in this joy there is love, and in the center of this love is the immeasurable, that, which is eternal, that, which cannot be called by name” (146).

This love transcends, but at what cost? Bejika has lived as a man for most of her life, her father was killed, her brother lost, and so on. It’s been a life of tragedy for her and in this moment, notably again centered around cows and the dairy, they “feel immortality.” Their reunion is undercut, still, by guilt. Dhana departs, leaving a letter behind. In that letter, she says, “It must be written for you and me to be eternally separated by something, and to shoulder the responsibility before God for every indirect murder we’ve committed” (137). The two feel more like star crossed lovers than Romeo and Juliet ever did, and recognizing that they’re both bound by their guilt is another tragic layer to the story, especially since the guilt originates from a system neither of them developed. Dhana comments on “that fairy-tale naivete where love exists outside of guilt and all else” (137). It’s a temporary reprieve from the eternal, “late at night and early in the morning, when the hands leave their clocks, and time is nothing but a detail, a blemish on the visage of a planet that, anytime [Dhana] gaze[s] into [Bejika’s] eyes, [she] makes [her] question whether it is even turning” (137). The letter goes on in a more sensual way recounting their reunion with a tender eroticism forever marred by their tragic pasts.

There’s yet another tragic element to the text revealed only when Bejika and Dhana reunite. Bejika develops a sudden sickness and needs to be hospitalized. It’s only then revealed that she’s lived another lie: when her mother bled out her twin, that wasn’t quite the truth. What happened was a fetus in fetu, where Bejika, as a baby, absorbed her other twin, but that twin continued to grow inside her. It’s a real thing, apparently, happening in one out of every 500, 000 sets of twins. There’s an irony here that undercuts Bejika’s own self-concept. For example, she always faulted herself for not being born a boy or strangling herself in the womb. Moreover, she converts to living as a man and lives most of her life as such, as though she was giving body to her lost twin. It also helps to account for the feeling she has that there’s someone inside her. She has always been dual and this symbolism gives voice to that.

I really loved this book. I felt it had so much to offer stylistically and emotionally. The concept is strong, the collaged and remixed structure enhances the novel’s power, and I thought it dealt with interesting themes in a complex way. It made me understand a little bit more about the world and pushed me to expand. I’m not sure what else I could ask for. So far, I think this is my frontrunner for my personal International Booker Prize readathon.

Happy reading!

The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

  Apologies to Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I read The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything immediately prior to going on vacation and now the distance is making this a challenging review to write. I would like to note, however, that when I was reading it and immediately after reading it, I found it endlessly reference-able. Jezer-Morton’s finger is so ‘on the pulse’ that I found I kept bringing it up in conversation to help explain so many of our everyday experiences.

Jezer-Morton’s approach is simultaneously academic and anecdotal. For instance, she may go from referencing Baudrillard to a famous influencer in the same breath. I appreciated that balance of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ throughout the text; it enriched the work and elevated our the discourse around phenomena as common as posting vacation pictures.

The book covers the phenomena we post, like vacations, birthdays, baby announcements, personal struggles and grief, and so on. While I don’t recall her mentioning Paul Ricoeur specifically, his notion that we understand ourselves through ‘life stories’ seems pertinent here. We edit our stories in a way that helps to shape our conceptions of ourselves. For instance, when we go on vacation, we post pictures of what we understand to be the purpose of travel and bring ourselves into the narrative of a life-changing trip, even if it disappoints us. In fact, everything we post, the author suggests, is part of our ‘brand.’ Each of us is a brand that we maintain by curating and posting details strategically, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it. The fact is, we follow conventions we’re not aware of, and it’s strange to see ourselves beholden to those social media patterns.

The chapters about ‘celebrations’ and ‘reproduction’ were interesting. In particular, I  learned that the whole notion of a ‘gender reveal’ party was born on social media as a way to engage with audiences. Jezer-Morton problematizes gender reveals (a misnomer in their own right, by the way…) and points to the harms that have occurred as a result—like people starting forest fires with their colourful fireworks. More interesting to me is that the first people to do it and post it on social media regret the direction it took. I’m interested in the long-term consequences of something that seemed innocuous to begin with.

Some chapters strike an interesting balance; Jezer-Morton is not of the mind that social media needs to be abolished, and it’s compelling to see how it produces access for some subsets of the population. In one chapter, Jezer-Morton talks about a restaurant in LA, I think The Sugar Factory if I remember correctly, and its strange place in culture. She describes the restaurant as not being particularly good but it gains notoriety because it caters so specifically to social media; all the food is ‘showy’ (even though it often goes uneaten, according to one of the employees). Servers bring out drinks with special effects and they do elaborate dances for the patrons. It’s a mid-level restaurant, a little pricey, but less expensive than, say, taking kids on vacation. The argument goes that taking photos there is a way of advertising wealth and glamour when one can’t fully engage in elaborate vacations. It’s a way of getting access to a wealthy conception of self when reality doesn’t align, exactly. Jezer-Morton describes going to the restaurant twice; the first night doesn’t have any instantiations of servers dancing, so her contact tells her to come back again the following night. One of the meals The Sugar Factor offers is a hamburger covered in 24K gold leaf (if that isn’t symbolic, I don’t know what is). The chapter ends on the server’s powerful line, told to her in secret, that tomorrow the family will “shit gold.”

The text documents a number of influencers’ perspectives and experiences, and one thing that comes up is that it is still gauche, verboten even, to display poverty online. One influencer describes really challenging experiences with two former partners who are both addicts, one of whom the woman sent to jail. She documents the abuses she was subjected to and puts it online to help process the grief and create connection. Among everything, though, she notes that you can never post about financial challenges. Audiences are not prepared for that. Of course, that extends into the posts of people who are using social media for business. Being honest about a failed MLM, for example, spells disaster for anyone trying to cling to the illusion.

The Story of Your Life also explores the haunting effect of monetizing our lives for others’ entertainment. For instance, a number of influencers make their living by posting their family content. From pregnancy announcements forward, couples will often share their experiences as parents and post their kids. The reality is, though, that after a certain age: audiences don’t care. Parents either need to have more children or pivot. It’s such a dark undercurrent to the family friendly content knowing that there’s an expiration date on the cute children that parents are profiting from. Let’s not even get started on trad wives.

One chapter that is particularly odd to me is the one on grief. Recognizing that we still must not show grief about lacking money, other forms of grief are acceptable and encouraged. Communities form around grief. I just have such a hard time seeing it as sincere rather than performative. If someone is upset and crying about traumatic loss, for example, I can’t help but picture that they recorded it in the moment, then took time to edit, then took time to post. To me, there’s so much distance from the actual grief and that performance of immediacy takes me out of it entirely. Jezer-Morton again points towards a balance; some people find genuine connection and community around grief.

These pockets of the internet are interesting to consider on their own, but I think the strength of Jezer-Morton’s book is in articulating how social media shapes the way we live. In some ways it’s like that classic debate of whether art imitates life or vice versa (do we count social media as art?). We have been conditioned to now see our lives through the lens of social media. We decide what is worth doing based on what is worth posting—what food we eat, what sights we see on vacation, how we choose to celebrate.

We also shape our lives around narratives that build; we act as if we’re building towards some kind of climax, as if our life is made of big moments. Towards the end of the text, Jezer-Morton makes a gesture towards ‘flat narratives,’ stories that are not decided by big moments. She thinks back to growing up on a commune where life was flat and where people shared notes in a guest book like an early form of social media. She imagines a world in which we share our quiet moments rather than emphasizing the big ones, a life where not much happens, but that we value those tiny moments. I’m not sure if the structure of social media will allow quiet living like that—it feels like the medium is geared towards subsuming everything into a grand narrative—but it does seem like a worthwhile aspiration. 

Happy reading!

The Witch by Marie NDiaye

What an odd book this is. Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize and despite its novella length (~130 pages), when I tried to summarize the plot to my partner it took me a solid 20 minutes. The Witch is partially a character study and partially a family drama focused on Lucie, a woman whose bloodline has the capacity for magic but whose talents are far inferior to those of her mother, her grandmother, and even her two daughters.

At the outset of the novel, we’re introduced to Lucie’s powers of divination—her ability to see into the past and into the future in a limited way, her visions accompanied by bloody tears. The novel begins with the completion of Lucie’s daughters’ training. Lucie has been training them in the basement and they’ve finally cried blood, a sure sign of their capabilities. I found the daughters to be particularly compelling figures. They’re oddly practical and detached, yet mischievous. At first, they don’t seem to make much use of their abilities, using their predictive powers merely to note that it’s raining tomorrow so they won’t be able to play basketball. As the novel progresses, they take on a more ominous quality—they transform into and out of being ravens and fly around, inspiring in their mother a certain pride but also fear of their inevitable departure, which they enact—transforming into ravens and flying away forever—when their Lucie tries to hold their hands in tandem).

In fact, a lot of the book revolves around generational disconnects and the tension between independence and collectivity. Witching serves as a kind of metaphor in that regard, being something that is passed down through generations of women. Lucie recognizes her own powers are relatively poor despite her mother’s powers being strong. Lucie’s mother tries to deny her powers, though, largely for the sake of her husband—Lucie does the same. NDiaye implies that it’s necessary for witches to be initiated into their skills before they turn thirteen, so there’s a kind of communion that must take place, but once the children are equipped with their skills, they have an alarming level of control over themselves and, potentially, others.

Indeed, the book feels disturbing precisely because of how disconnected everyone seems from one another. For example, Lucie has a neighbour, Isabelle, with a young son who is always on edge. Isabelle expresses a great deal of disdain for him and spends her time trying to get him into a private school in Paris so that she doesn’t have to deal with him. She alludes to leaving, pointing to the sky, and Lucie later sees Isabelle’s son on a school trip. Isabelle, meanwhile, has abandoned her son and husband, neither of whom seem happy—and indeed, Lucie sees the son in the future as a morose man. The book starts with a scene, too, where Lucie’s husband Pierrot brings home a guest from his timeshare-selling club (Pierrot’s job is to scam people into timeshares). It’s revealed that the man has abandoned his wife and child and that Pierrot has a strange reverence for him because he intends to, and does, do the same. Lucie’s mother is disconnected from her grandmother; Pierrot’s mother ultimately disowns her own daughter by the end of the novel, and that daughter ends a pregnancy. When Pierrot gets a new family, he keeps a smiling face while conversing with Lucie and simultaneously kicking his new partner’s children. Late in the book Lucie starts teaching and grows to resent her students, another form of generational disdain. There’s a motif throughout the book of people abandoning their families and hating children. It also seems to be that everyone remembers one another differently. Lucie continually expresses shock at how different people seem from when she last saw them and vice versa. There’s a feeling of disorientation that permeates the text.

One of the most marked disorientations is probably Pierrot’s sister. Lucie and her daughters Maud and Lise visit Pierrot’s mom and sister, the latter of which has become much more rotund and is heavily made up. It’s implied that she’s maybe selling sex, but it’s not confirmed—though she is pregnant. Maud and Lise want to have a fun night on the town with Lili and take her out. It’s implied they turn into ravens again. When they return the next morning they announce cheerily that there’s no more baby. It’s an ominous, compelling moment. It’s only in the closing pages of the book that we return to Lili. By the end, her mother has given up on her, thinking her daughter has gone insane. She keeps rambling about birds coming back to take her away or becoming a bird or some other kind of nonsense. She, too, is left with no one.

The book, for all its brevity, has a number of plot threads that are hard to summarize. If we follow the main character, the main points are that Pierrot has left her and the children behind. Lucie does not want him back, but discovers that he has taken 120, 000 francs that her father had given her. She tries to get the money back and discovers her husband’s whereabouts through divination; when she tracks him down he discovers he has a new partner, very religious, and three children. This, despite the fact that he wanted to eschew all conventions. He hated his wife, he hated his kids, he hated living in the suburbs, he hated his job, he hated conventions and patterns and he wanted out. When Lucie is unable to reclaim the money he stole (how does she think they’re living, the new woman wonders), she leaves. Meanwhile, she has a plan to ‘parent trap’ her parents. She can’t fathom how they were able to have a happy thirty years together and then part ways, now being separated for five years and with her mom having a new partner. So, she’s trying to convince her mom and dad to meet together for a cottage getaway she has arranged. Her mom insists it’s a terrible idea and warns of something very bad happening. Her dad says he’ll do it but he needs the 120, 000 francs back: turns out he was embezzling it from clients at his insurance agency and he’s sure he’ll get demoted but that he may be able to avoid arrest if he gives it back. Lucie does not tell him she doesn’t have it. The central threads are pretty compelling.

I’m left to wonder, though, about the idea of conventions and why the last act of the book gets so strange. NDiaye continually refers to the words on characters’ clothes, as if they are branded with slogans as placeholders for genuine experience. Pierrot rages against conventional bourgeois life. Maud and Lise are obsessed with TV, which Lucie aligns with premonition—she thinks perhaps her children are unimpressed with their divination powers because, thanks to television, nothing is surprising anymore. Lucie also reflects on the predictable secrets and disclosures of soap operas. We come into stories with expectations of how they can go.

The Witch does not follow such conventions.

In the last act, Lucie (re)encounters her neighbour Isabelle. It seems trite to ask who the real witch is, but Isabelle is certainly a contender. The dialogue between them feels ominous in its manipulation. Having been abandoned by her husband and her children, with her parents unlikely to reunite, Isabelle asks who still cares about Lucie and she would be hard pressed for an answer. She asks this under the guise of offering her a job at a new school she has started, funded by taxpayers: a school for Women’s Spiritual Health. To the reader, it feels like a deal with the devil, but Lucie accepts a position teaching divination to young women (Objective Knowledge of Past and Future for Self and Others). This, among other classes where teachers are continually depleted to their vampiric students, absorbing their energy. It’s another critique of bourgeois society where rich people take frivolous courses like Introduction to Therapeutic Colours, Advanced Knowledge of the Self, Progressive Discovery of the Unknown Muscle, and so on. Using her divination powers sap Lucie’s strength, and her students are perfectly content to have their pasts and futures told, so instead of actually teaching she just gives them the information they want (is this modern education with ChatGPT…?). In any case, she just gives fake information that is plausible enough.

There’s a really interesting moment in which Lucie reflects on her talents. She is teaching at a school where she sees everyone as frauds, “woo woo New Age” types. Being in that context, she doubts her own gifts: “I began to doubt that I’d ever possessed any gift other than fabrication, that the kind of power the women of my maternal family thought they enjoyed even existed” (116). She thinks about her gifts as mere superstition, and that the only thing it accomplished is that the women in her bloodline convinced themselves. She reflects that they convinced themselves so utterly “that we believed in what we thought we were seeing—of the truth of stories handed down by unhappy women, poor, downtrodden, naively cunning old women like my credulous ancestress, so passionate about divination, my mother’s mother” (116). She considers that her children did not turn into birds but instead hitchhiked or were arrested. She sees herself as “nothing more than a pathetic woman of a perfectly ordinary kind, abandoned, a fraud, like my fellow teachers, their faces worn down by drab torment, by mediocre calamity” (116). If we return to the idea of an individual against a collective, we see that she tries to pride herself on her unique talents but loses that sense of self by being among a community of people she cannot respect. She is absorbed into the same fraudulent existence as her counterparts, a parallel to her husband’s experience as a bourgeois salesman.

Here’s where the ending really takes an ironic turn that subverts our bourgeois expectations. The police show up and Isabelle placates them with respect to her educational institution, but sics them on Lucie. The students have accused her of—get this—not witchcraft. They accuse her of making things up and she is charged for being a charlatan and a fraud and taken to prison. It’s a great, darkly comic twist that where women have continually been tried for being witches, here we are with a witch being tried for not being a witch. All the same, the police won’t touch her, fearing that she is a witch, while charging her for not being one. The scene escalates, but I won’t spoil that part.

I will, however, spoil the culmination of her parents’ reunion. Skip this paragraph if you want to retain a sense of surprise. A common thread in International Booker Prize shortlisters this year is the idea of guilt and complicity. When Lucie tries to reunite her parents, her mom ultimately explains why their reunion is impossible and the explanation is fraught with emotional complexity. She explains as follows:

“She and my father had been married for twenty-five years without I-knew-what (her power, her gift) ever coming between them, both because my father was deeply skeptical and because she herself made very sure not to show any sign of it. She only worked marvels in secret. She did work them, yes, she couldn’t help herself, because she was enormously talented. But one evening, without in any way meaning to, my father caught her. Coming home earlier than usual, he spotted the tip of a serpent’s tail. She never doubted that she could easily make him forget that, so deep was his disbelief, and in any case he didn’t say anything, he didn’t shout, didn’t protest. He didn’t react at all. In truth, she had nothing to reproach him for. It was her, my mother, who, knowing that he’d seen what he wasn’t supposed to, felt her affection mutate as the days went by into a frenzied longing to destroy him. He had to be punished for letting himself see what he should have closed his eyes to, even if it wasn’t his fault. She would have done him some irreparable harm. She felt a need taking root in her, the need to punish him, crush him, destroy him, and there was no hope of quelling it. She didn’t hate him, no, but the enigmatic, powerful part of her that revealed itself only in solitude and darkness, that cold, imperious, violent part of her was at war with her usual goodwill toward my father. She would soon have used her genius to demolish him in some vile way. Realizing that, she left, she fled.” (87)

Like other International Booker Prize nominees, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, and The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, there’s this question of what makes someone guilty. There’s an ambiguity of who is at fault: the perpetrator or the witness, and the way in which the dynamic between them forever changes on the moment of recognition. There’s a complex ethics here that recalls Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. The fact that she can’t forgive him for having seen her, for being recognized, is such a challenging and complex feeling to explore.

(Spoilers continue here). The way the storyline of the parents’ reunion plays out is such an odd and haunting one. Lucie’s mom’s new boyfriend comes to her to deliver a message. Her mom feigns being busy so as not to be seen. The message comes with a gift: a small can with a snail in it eating grass. That snail is her father. They went through with their reunion, but as promised Lucie’s mom has done something bad in transforming her ex into a snail, presumably forevermore. Lucie, meanwhile, hears from his insurance company that they are indeed pressing charges and he’ll be under arrest if he comes back. Then, when Lucie is arrested, she has her possessions taken away. When she’s released, her possessions are gone; she assumes her snaildad was tossed away and crushed under foot. A dark end for someone who tried so hard not to recognize magic. 

The ending of the novel is imbued with irony and sadness. Everyone feels disconnected. Everyone feels isolated. Even Pierrot, now expanding his new family with a new child, does not seem too thrilled about his new life, reverting to his dark visage once more.

NDiaye’s style is replete with complex sentences. Some of the clauses take readers on a full journey before revealing the central point. At the same time, the style feels direct and accessible. There’s a simplicity to the language, but a complexity to the expression. The sentences read like the magic visions of its central character: in some ways they are illuminating and vivid, in other ways sparse and oblique.

Despite the digital ink I’ve spilled on this review, The Witch perplexes me. I still don’t know how to feel about its strange tone and its unsettling dynamics. The characters feel cruel, cold, and distant, but I still feel for them—even and especially when they literally cease being human. The Witch is an uncomfortable read, and it’s difficult to navigate how our individualism puts us at odds across generations and how we abandon one another through our own pursuits. I’m sure there is much more to discuss here, but my augury is limited and I won’t be able to speak to all of the author’s intentions.

With that said, happy reading!