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Trois Femmes Puissantes (2009)

by Marie NDiaye(Favorite Author)

3.17 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

2070786544 (ISBN13: 9782070786541)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Editions Gallimard

review 1: Three Strong Women is a tall tale from Japan, about a young wrestler named Forever-Mountain, who sets out on a journey to find himself. He has an arrogance about him at first, but when he meets a farmer named Maru-Me, his strength and attitude are tested. Maru-Me, her mother, and grandmother are all farmers with a secret, they are exceptionally strong. Forever-Mountain is no match for their strength or wit, and he soon finds out how little he knew before he met these women. When Forever-Mountain sets out to wrestler in a match against a townsmen, he shows unbelievable strength. In the end, Forever-Mountain realizes he wasn't fit to be a wrestler all along, but rather was meant to live with Maru-Me as a farmer. His wrestling stomps are said to still be heard (thunder) ... moreand the tale is that the noise comes from Forever-Mountain wrestling with Maru-Me's grandmother. This tall tale contains various elements associated with traditional literature. The story focuses on a man's journey to find himself. The main characters are humans.Some concepts from the book that could be integrated into the classroom are maturity and forecasting.
review 2: A strange, confusing, and compelling book. This is not so much a novel as a collection of three novellas, each of which features a woman who is either Senegalese or of Senegalese background. In the first, Norah, who was raised in France, is summoned to Senegal by her imperious, frightening, mostly absent father. He has something he wants her to do for him, and she gradually, and to her horror, finds out what it is. The second novella puts us inside of a Frenchman, Rudy, who is married to a Senegalese woman and who seems to be losing his sanity. The third focuses on Fanta, an impoverished widow whose dead husband's family mistreats her and finally pays to have someone take her off their hands.NDiaye's style is dreamlike and very subjective, so sometimes one has to work hard to figure out what is going on. (The book was originally written in French, but I don't believe any of the ambiguities have to do with the translation.) Supernatural elements intrude, and it's hard to know when they are meant to be taken as "real" and when as fantasies of one character or another. None of the main characters are entirely reliable: there are memory slips, possible hallucinations, and lies. Fortunately I read this with my book group, because I had a chance to try to hash all this out with a bunch of very smart women. We didn't come to any grand conclusions, and yet most of us agreed that there is something eerie and genuinely powerful in this book. less

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