Lucie—the narrator of NDiaye’s surreal portrait of a woman’s identity in flux—is a witch. Unfortunately, she’s not very accomplished at her craft, which has been passed down through generations of women in her family. When she begins to instruct her 12-year-old twin daughters, Maud and Lise, about the mysterious powers she possesses, they dutifully absorb her lessons. One of them remarks, “No offense, Mama, but really, it’s all just so lame,” but soon both girls far surpass her in the occult arts. While Lucie sheds pale tears only tinged with red, the girls manifest their powers by crying actual tears of blood. Lucie’s moody, unhappy salesman husband, the aptly named Pierrot—French for clown—flees the family home with funds entrusted to Lucie by her father. Her efforts to recover the money and reunite her parents, whose own marriage has dissolved, are conveyed in NDiaye’s trademark dreamlike style. (Some episodes might better be called nightmares.) Lucie grapples with her uneven relationship with Pierrot’s mother, and a visit to her home provides Maud and Lise with an eerie, macabre opportunity to practice their developing supernatural skills on Pierrot’s pregnant sister, their hapless aunt. A relationship with a repulsive, conniving neighbor results in an opportunity for Lucie to teach divination at Isabelle O.’s Women’s University of Spiritual Health, where the spurious curriculum includes an Introduction to Therapeutic Colors. (In NDiaye’s ironic twist on Lucie’s tenure there, Lucie has to defend herself against charges of fraud by asserting her status as a “sort of witch.”) Originally published in France in 1996, NDiaye’s concise tale of female power, maternal identity, and family secrets has been ably translated by Stump, a frequent collaborator.
