I like reading a French book from time to time in order to use and improve my French. Unfortunately, I rarely enjoy them because they are always so weird. Not any different with this one.
The story starts easy enough but then there are so many sub stories thrown in without any rhyme or reason. The story is very sad but it gets really weird towards the end. And it's just not the disturbing story that annoyed me, there wasn't a single loveable or even likeable character in the whole novel. No, not really my cup of tea.
From the back cover:
"When pregnant Rosie Carpe, her fatherless five-year-old son in tow, arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her elusive brother, Lazare, the world already seems a plenty confusing place. Could the man who comes to meet her, an elegant black man calling himself Lagrand, actually be her disheveled white brother? Are her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, rediscovering themselves in an outrageous second youth of outlandish affairs, or have they simply lost their minds? And does Rosie have a hope of slipping the sticky grasp of her former employer and seducer, who moonlights as a video pornographer? If it seems unlikely that the feckless Lazare, missing for five years as he followed his own twisted path, might help, or that carnivalesque Guadeloupe, where murder and mayhem are the natural outcomes of “business ventures,” might be the place for Rosie to find peace, then Marie NDiaye may have a few surprises in store for her reader. Amid the blurring boundaries and shifting values, the indistinct realities and confusing certainties of Rosie Carpe, a love story unfolds, and all that is ambiguous and tenuous – in short, all of Rosie’s world – is underpinned with a measure of tenderness."
Although I have studied French for years, my French is not fluent at all. I keep purchasing books in French but have consult my translation dictionary so often that I usually give up. I don't think I will be adding Rosie Carpe to my reading list. It does indeed sound weird, even in English :) Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHappy Reading,
Rebecca @ The Key to the Gate
Thank you, Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteI try to keep my foreign languages fluent by reading books written in that language. French takes me the longest and I don't often find good French books. Camus and Le Clézio come to mind, I like their kind of writing.
I hope you will find your kind of French literature, I always enjoy having finished one even if I didn't like it, like this one.
Have a good weekend,
Marianne
"I like reading a French book from time to time in order to use and improve my French. Unfortunately, I rarely enjoy them because they are always so weird. Not any different with this one." Oh my gosh, that made me laugh. Might I suggest a French-Canadian book? :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Marianne, I'm glad you liked that. ;-)
DeleteAny suggestions as to good French-Canadian authors?