Three Strong Women by Marie Ndiaye

These are three linked novellas that center on three different women with three different definitions of ‘strong’.  The author grew up in France, born of a French mother and a Senegalese father, and like her, the three women have links with both France and Senegal—going from most connected to France to most connected to Africa in the order of the books.  One word of caution—these are not uplifting stories.  The women are tough because they have to be, not because they want to be.  Worse still there are really no men in the story who have any redeeming qualities.  They are selfish, brutish, narcissistic, occasionally sadistic, and not one of them is someone you would want to sit next to on a train, much less work with or have a social relationship with.

The first story is about Norah, who travels to visit her estranged Senegalese father who, years earlier, had left his French wife and daughters while taking his 5-year-old son back to Senegal. He is unbearable, both as a man and as a father.  Norah learns that her father is a ruined man, and he has taken out a most callous revenge on her brother.  The trauma includes small children of uncertain parentage abandoned after their mother is killed—I warned you, these are not happy stories.

In the second story, a French man fears losing Fanta, his African lover, and their son due to his financial and moral failings. We see little of Fanta beyond her graceful reticence, but we become uncomfortably intimate with her partner, Rudy, a mentally unhinged kitchen renovation salesman with a persistent hemorrhoidal itch (I will not make any Freudian comments other than to say they are obvious).

In the third, we re-encounter Khady, glimpsed earlier by Norah, who is a childless widow cast out by her husband’s family. She journeys from the relative stability of life as a West African market woman to ever-grimmer forms of exploitation.  The moral is that while Europe is not a kind environment, Africa is more brutal and offers up less in the way of justice or revenge.