Le livre me laisse un sentiment partagé. La deuxième histoire, la plus longue, fut la plus dure à lire et j'avoue avoir sauté des lignes de description des états d'âme qui rendent pénibles la lecture. Au début, j'ai bien apprécié la retranscription des pensées du personnage en temps réel, qui permet de vraiment sentir le dégoût de soi-même qu'il éprouve. Néanmoins le procédé est tellement répété que ça traine en longueur et on finit par maudire le personnage et par espérer qu'il perde son travail et sa femme et qu'on en parle plus ! Given the Prix Goncourt and some of the reviews that have gone to this novel, I had rather high hopes, which were met with overall disappointment. Though it states 'roman' (novel), the book is really a set of three subtly-linked novellas dealing with people struggling. Despite the title, Three Strong (or powerful) Women, these people aren't necessarily all female. The central (and lenghthiest) novel of the work actaully features a male protagonist trying to get through a particularly difficult day. Forced to empathize with his struggles, the reader has to slog through pages of extended convolutions, blocks of text with few breaks. Most every sentence is a paragraph. Only occasionally does dialogue come up with a paragraph that has more than one sentence within. Instead, N'Diaye writes her sentences with commas between them, burying single concepts or clauses between (or within parenthesis that take the author on an aside that has nothing to do with what the paragraph began discussing, like deciding to talk about the light that flows through the curtains as I type this, bathing me in this odd greenish glow that makes me feel somewhat odd - though that could also be from all the cheesy poofs that I just ate - odd like the feelings of sickness in the early morning, or odd like the feeling one gets after smelling a particularly noxious odor - which, by the way, is a sensory theme that N'Diaye seems to pick up and employ frequently, relating all the odiferous assaults on each character) in a way that makes it exceptionally hard to follow, particularly when in a foreign language, and which really makes it quite a shame because the author clearly has enormous talents in writing.Breaks are nice. If I doubled the length of that previous sentence we'd get at the average N'Diaye size, though admittedly, she does it with superior grammatical aplomb. Ok, but beyond this annoying style of N'Diaye, what about what her novel does have to say? Featuring a male, the central part of the book is somewhat interesting because it still ends up telling a story of woman (his wife), but from his point of view alone. A metaphor perhaps for how women are viewed in the world (or at least certain societies) - only through the lens of another, of a male? Such focus is given to the protagonist's life, and only rarely in relation to his wife, that even this 'read' on N'Diaye's approach seems wrong, or that she has failed. In the end, the central story of midlife crisis seems to offer very little new in the way of observation or clarity.The two proper 'stories of women' that bookend the large central chunk are actually far more interesting, though written in the same style of dense text that wanders through the protagonist's myriad, at times conflicting thoughts. To be fair, this is a strength of N'DIaye, and partially a reason for the style she uses: everything is conveyed in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner - in a rush, without breaks, with ideas buried in others, turning away and towards the overall point where the whole train of thought began. She does this really well, so close to how the mind actually works that it simply makes it unbearable to read.
What do You think about Drie Sterke Vrouwen (2009)?
Amazing writer. The middle story is not as strong as the other two.
—tinknock71
I cannot help it. I am a sucker for a good NPR review.
—Bluartistry
Loved Part I, so far not really getting into Part II...
—TenshII
