That Time of Year

by Marie NDiaye, Jordan Stump (Translator)

Overview

"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." —The New York Review of Books

Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The community he encounters, however, has become alien, practically unrecognizable, and his urgent inquiry, placed in the care of local officials, quickly recedes into the background, shuffled into a deck of labyrinthine bureaucracy and local custom. As time passes, Herman, wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by communal surveillance, strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, and a hospitality that verges on mania.

A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington, Victor LaValle, and Kōbō Abe, NDiaye’s novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641493
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,084,272
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

About the Author

Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

Jordan Stump is one of the leading translators of innovative French literature. The recipient of numerous honors and prizes, he has translated books by Nobel laureate Claude Simon, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and Eric Chevillard, as well as Jules Verne’s French-language novel The Mysterious Island. His translation of NDiaye’s All My Friends was shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

Read an Excerpt

The president broke into a spirited laugh, patting Herman’s knee under the table. But Herman’s dismay had waned the moment he heard the receptionist’s name. Moved, he looked at her, and Métilde smiled back with an air of genuine friendship.

“Yes, you’re going to help me,” Herman said to himself, “and then . . . ”

Flattered, happy, he was caught up in a sort of euphoria that made him want to talk to everyone around him, to explain himself, to earn their pity and esteem. When Charlotte came back and sat down, he leaned toward her and Métilde, and in a voice loud and clear enough to be heard by everyone in the room he recounted at length what had happened to his family, his failure at the gendarmerie, the idea he’d first had of going to see the mayor. All the while, he studied the two women’s faces respectfully turned toward his, their eyes attentive, their brows thoughtful. A flood of joy washed over him, and he forgot to be ashamed of it as he told them of Rose and his little boy. He didn’t think anyone had ever listened to him so closely, so patiently, with such consideration and good will. Everyone around him had fallen silent. Frozen in mid-bow, Charlotte’s mother pressed the salad bowl to her belly, as if in prayer, meditative, drinking in Herman’s words. The corners of Métilde’s mouth were delicately turned up in a caring little smile. Herman exulted in feeling so tragic: had anyone ever thought of him that way, had he ever, just once, moved someone? Then the thought of Rose turned abstract, supplanted by the intense pleasure of attracting the sympathy of the women around him, of holding their still unknown, obscure minds in his grip.

When he finished he glanced at the president. Alfred was contemplating him, leaning back in his chair. Herman couldn’t make out if he approved. But he was vaguely troubled, once again, by the strange, unpleasant sense of a syrupy wave of affection pouring from Alfred’s face, a face fleshy and severe as a watchful pasha’s, the moment Herman turned toward him, even briefly.

“Poor man,” his neighbor with the many pens remarked in a soft, melodious voice.

Editorial Reviews

Disturbing and heartbreaking…Easily leaps from the subject of exile, to grief, to the comedy of both cosmopolitan and small-town arrogance.” —Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story

“For all its elements of pyschological horror, there is something hauntingly real to NDiaye’s world, where ‘pale, serene, detached, smiling faces hid an inconsolable sorrow.’” —The New York Times

“One of NDiaye’s early texts, [That Time of Year] serves as a site of play for the writer’s longtime interests, from class mobility and assimilation to power and control, and offers an opportunity to survey the development of a writer whose enviably imagined and intelligently executed stories have propelled her into the international spotlight…a haunting lesson about the ease with which a panicked outsider can be lulled into complacency and inaction.” —Bookforum

“The book, which is a rumination on (and a cackle at) the stark differences between privileged urban and disenfranchised provincial life, feels particularly timely in this moment when the pandemic has altered the norms of cosmopolitan living and sent many urbanites fleeing to the countryside. But That Time of Year is no comedy of manners; the headline of NDiaye’s story is not to satirize the crassness of rural newcomers so much as it is about how about how all her characters, when faced with their own specific varieties of isolation are, by force of nature, blind, muddled, incurious, and most of all suspended in their acquiescence.…It is [NDiaye's] light, distant touch and the tradition of experimental writing that turns what should be satire into something more spare and thrilling.” —Abby Walthausen, The Believer

“What at first appears to be a Kafkaesque fable about insiders and outsiders quickly morphs into a metaphysical horror story about the bonds between the living and the dead ... The novel shares some DNA with the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream in its embrace of the fantastic and as a haunting reinvention of the literary horror story ... it left me eager to read more.” —Chicago Review of Books

“That Time of Year is a thriller of unsettling quiet: about how to disappear into the crowd, to erase your otherness and melt into your surroundings.” —Kenyon Review

“A study in claustrophobia, a locked-room mystery of sorts, a ghost story without the ghosts, a parable about tourism and power: all of these describe Marie NDiaye’s slippery, mesmeric That Time of Year.” —Full Stop

“Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style…this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

”Superb…a biting, brilliant exposé on class and privilege, entitlement and hypocrisy, power and control.” —Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

“A blend of psychological realism and the uncanny… That Time of Year is acutely attuned to the themes of our time. It echoes current conversations around entitlement and privilege and shows how those with money know little to nothing of the trials faced by the poor and working class. At a time in America when those with means are flocking from cities to ride out a pandemic in their country homes, setting up inevitable conflicts with locals, it is clear to me that it currently is That Time of Year, and an English version of NDiaye’s book couldn’t appear at a more important moment.” —Barrelhouse

“Marie NDiaye is one of my favorite living writers and That Time of Year is yet another shape-shifting masterpiece. Here the disappearance of the protagonist’s family is not a mystery to be solved, but rather one that gradually opens a portal into social and psychological terror. NDiaye is a virtuoso of the haunted, the alienated, the submerged, the powerfully strange—and this new novel is as thrilling as it is profound.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and The Third Hotel

“If Kafka decided to join up with Jacques Tati to rewrite Shirley Jackson's “The Summer People,” you might end up with something like NDiaye's absurd and dryly comic novel about the perils of staying too long on vacation.  That Time of Year progresses with the fluid logic of a dream that, when you scratch its surface, reveals the image of a nightmare beneath.” —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." —The New York Review of Books

“Compelling, inevitable, and, much like the village, easy to get lost in. That Time of Year is a hypnotic novel about the spell cast by a village on its inhabitants, willing and otherwise.” —Foreword Reviews

“NDiaye is writing a literature both innovative and incredible.” —The New Republic

“[NDiaye’s] inspiration lies not in the real world but in nightmares.” —The New York Times

“NDiaye is a rare novelist.” —NPR

“[NDiaye] is an impressive stylist with a strong voice.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“If any contemporary European writer is on the verge of Ferrante-like recognition, it’s NDiaye.” —Flavorwire

From the Publisher

07/20/2020

French writer Ndiaye (The Cheffe) serves up a blistering critique of bourgeois French society in this eerie tale. Herman, a Parisian teacher, is on vacation with his family in a remote village, and one stormy evening his wife and child disappear. As he searches for them, his fear for their safety dissipates into numbing frustration as he navigates the complex village gendarmerie and other bureaucracies, where everyone is polite but never truly helpful. He meets Alfred, a low-level bureaucrat who claims Herman will never see his family again unless he becomes a villager, leading Herman to take a room next to Alfred’s at an expensive inn, where Herman gradually learns that the villagers’ elaborate displays of gentility, such as an extended bow from the innkeeper, mask cruel intentions. Everything Herman once found important—his job, family, ambition, even his personal appearance—slides away as he loses touch with himself, “no longer troubling to determine the date.” Ndiaye pulls off a fascinating group portrait of the town, capturing the shifts in behavior of each character in relation to the power they hold or are beholden to. Her chilling tale offers a powerful chronicle of the failure of one man’s will. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2020-07-14
A Parisian family that summers each year in a small village learns the hard way they have overstayed their welcome in this deeply unsettling and slippery novella.

On Sept. 1, Herman embarks on a search for his wife, Rose, and their son, who had gone to the neighboring farmhouse to pick up eggs and not returned. Never having stayed past the end of August before, he is shocked by the sudden turn in the weather from sunny and temperate to cold and rainy literally overnight, a pathetic fallacy and our first introduction to the village as a character of menacing proportions, populated by disturbing residents, all of whom slide sideways around Herman’s ever increasing anxiety in charming, yet frighteningly empty, ways. When he seeks out the village’s mayor to tell him what's going on, he meets Alfred, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who turns out to be a former Parisian who also once stayed past summer’s end. Alfred takes Herman on as a project, vowing to turn him into a local, and sets Herman on a path where he must find a way to withstand the unending gray, stormy landscape or simply melt away. As he attempts to navigate the village’s internal politics and strangely archaic rituals with Alfred’s help, he falls helplessly into its life as if tumbling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, his urgency slowly transforming to inert apathy. When he finally learns what happened to his wife and child, he ends up with more questions than answers. Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style, this slim, sleek story has a veneer of sly sophistication that belies the horror of malignancy within the village and Herman himself.

Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.

Kirkus Reviews