Ndiaye, Marie: The Witch

Translated by Jordan Stump. In a small town, a mediocre witch, in a mediocre marriage, tries to pass on her gifts to her twin daughters, who, it becomes immediately apparent, have skills far beyond her own. "What was it about me, I asked myself, that kept me from being a good witch? Did I lack the will, the intensity, the rage?"      Lucie comes from a long line of witches, ​powers passed down from mother to daughter. Her own mother was formidable in her gifts, but ashamed of her magic. Perhaps as a result, Lucie’s own talent is weak: she can see into the future, sometimes—but more often, she can only see the present of some other location. Most frustrating is that all she can ever see are insignificant details, snippets—a scrap of outfit, the color of the sky. Against the wishes of her malicious, salesman husband, Lucie initiates her hesitant twin daughters into their family’s peculiar womanhood—a sort of wisdom kept sacred and hated—when they reach twelve years of age. In a few short months, Maud and Lise are crying the curious tears of blood that denote their magical powers. Having learned, they take off quickly and fly the nest—literally—leaving Lucie more unmoored than she was before.     Witty, dreamlike, disquieting, and utterly enchanting (pun intended), The Witch brings the mysteries of womanhood and motherhood, precarity and class, into sharp relief and leaves us teetering on the edge, unbalanced. Like a William Faulkner novel set in modern France, the book conjures a vivid and enclosed place with no easy escape, as seemingly unbreakable relationships falter left and right. Fighting the entropy her husband and father bring in to her life, Lucie is a classic NDiaye heroine: a woman standing on the lip of a situation about to spin out of control. Ultimately, her life raises questions that we all have to ask: How can home be a place that nurtures, when mother-blood has manifold powers: to rescue, to capture, to entrap, or abandon? What does it mean to provide for the ones you love? And how can you— can you? —build a nest that no one wants to fly from?