That Time of Year

The underlying sinisterism that pervades nearly all of Marie NDiaye's fiction is absolutely irresistible. Set in a provincial town well outside of Paris, That Time of Year (translated from the French by Jordan Stump) is the story of Parisian math teacher Herman, whose wife and child go missing during their final days of summer holiday. Are the townsfolk messing with him on purpose? Are they all involved in some malevolent plot? Why does everyone, including the mayor, have such a nonchalant attitude toward Herman and his missing family? NDiaye’s newest novel is another expertly crafted tale rich in eerie atmospherics. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com

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.

“NDiaye is a rare novelist.” NPR

“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 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

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.

Marie Ndiaye was born in 1976 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.