After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. Trois femmes puissantes (Gallimard) was already established as a favourite with the reading public. One suspects that the majority of those readers are women, for we are in feminist territory here, and it feels a little old-fashioned.
The three powerful women of the title — Norah, Fanta, Khady Temba — rebel against the circumstances of their lives and are praised for doing so in a style that found favour with the jury, although it reads awkwardly and is deliberately abrupt. The first of the women, Norah, is encumbered with a dilapidated father and an idle lover who has moved into her apartment with this small daughter. There is also an alcoholic sister and a delinquent brother.
This, for some reason, was thought exemplary, as were the travails of the other two protagonists, Fanta and Khady Temba. Fanta is found powerful for ignoring her husband, whose mental debility is well described, while Khady Temby is obliged, after the death of her husband, to live with his family, her hopes of a child of her own gone for ever.
The main characteristic of these women is resilience in the face of their hard post-colonial lives. Admirable in intention, these stories do not entirely disguise the despair and resignation at their heart. Even the style, so much admired, seems febrile with suppressed frustration.
Much more accessible, though in a more obvious idiom is Frederic Beigbeder’s Un roman français (Grasset) which was awarded the Prix Renaudot. As the title suggests the author claims to speak for France, but also, overwhelmingly, for himself. Picked up by the police after a drugs bust, he has time in his cell to reflect on his past, which is not extensive since at the time of writing he is 42. He claims to have no memory of his childhood but manages to fill many pages with his reflections on this phenomenon.
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