Marie NDiaye has a background in linguistics, and does it ever show: while her prose is on the surface rather simple, her narrative technique is truly magnificent. Although remaining in the third-person throughout all of the stories collected in All My Friends, NDiaye is able to tap into the psychological mindsets of the stories' main characters, still remaining detached yet observant, similarly skillful—although by no means in terms of style—in this type of omniscient narration as Woolf was in Mrs. Dalloway.

Most of the stories take place on the outskirts of Paris, and this is fitting as NDiaye is concerned with marginalized characters whose stories we rarely get to hear, whose contempt for Paris and the more bourgeois world of culture and privilege is always seething under the surface of their own personal conflicts. And each character is indeed poised at the point of conflict, some so deluded in their own thoughts and only slowly allowing the truth to reach the level of consciousness that it's truly awe-inspiring to see how NDiaye can situate the reader within a similar kind of unease or unrest. We come to the realizations with the characters, and, for this reason, I think it's imperative that one not read the blurb on the back cover: NDiaye takes her time to parse the information with which she first bombards the reader (and her characters), starting in medias res both in terms of narration and also in terms of psychological tension. The build-up, and what she withholds, are crucial to her pacing and plotting. One example of what I mean here is how a conversation occurs between one main character and a man whose first name is given for several pages; it is only toward the end of the conversation that the omniscient narrator places the qualifying "her husband" before his name, causing the conversation that just ensued to have an intimacy that was removed and in effect displaced.

Each of these stories is devastating in its own way, dealing with subject matter that might be hard for some people to fathom with the open mind that NDiaye begs of her readers. Searing insight is on each page here, too, into how we distance ourselves in our past and present relationships with others; how we distance ourselves from the truth in order to remain as inviolable as we possibly can; and how the ties that bind—familial and those that we choose—can involve making decisions that, to outsiders, might seem to be unethical or immoral but which, in our state of confusion and panic, seem the only logical way out.

NDiaye was the first black woman to win the coveted Prix Goncourt: her talent is that evident and iconoclastic, even when it is quiet, meditative, and concerned with minutiae and ambiguity. I look forward to reading [b:Three Strong Women|13155297|Three Strong Women|Marie NDiaye|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344369394s/13155297.jpg|7011163] very, very soon.

Edit: Having now read Three Strong Women, my review of this other NDiaye title is here.

4.5 stars ( )

The five short stories in this excellent collection all deal with ordinary people facing the shortcomings of their lives.

The narrator of the title story is lost and lonely. He tries to connect with his maid (a former student), his estranged wife, an old acquaintance, and the maid’s husband (a former student of his). His attempts fail. He tries to enter a conversation, “But no one hears my wispy voice, and no one pays any mind. I'm nowhere at all anymore.”

In “The Death of Claude François,” an office visit from childhood friend Marlène Vador prompts Doctor Zaka to visit the neighborhood of her childhood. She finds that things are not always the way we remember them.

“The Boys” is the most sinister of the five stories. An impoverished family sells a son into some sort of servitude. A neighbor boy witnesses the transaction and the apparently beneficial results for the family. He decides that he, too, should be sold.

Minor actress Eve Brulard faces fading career hopes, a failed marriage, and a difficult relationship with her daughter in “Brulard’s Day.”

“Revelation” a story of a mother saying goodbye to her son who is about to be institutionalized is the shortest, but most poignant of the five stories.

For the most part, Marie Ndiaye treats her subjects with gentle understanding. We can feel empathy with these troubled individuals trying to deal with life’s disappointments. There are things left unsaid and it is not always easy to fill in the blanks. But that’s life and these stories are intriguing slices of life.

Book is from my personal collection. ( )

When it comes to novels, I like getting dropped into the middle of a story and having to collect clues along the way to get the whole picture. However, with most of the short stories in this collection, I could not pick up enough to clues to really get the whole picture and felt I had to make assumptions or guesses. And sometimes I felt like the object at the centre of the picture was too obtuse for me to grasp. Perhaps that is my reading, perhaps the writing. There were times when I found the sentences so long and full of so many phrases that I lost the thread -- I felt like a high school student trying to make sense of Dickens. Other times I could not determine pronoun antecedents and thus was left with an ambiguous sense of the action. She may be a good writer, but she's not for me. ( )

well... what a peculiar and haunting collection of stories. NDiyae is an elegant, lovely writer. there's a lyrical or poetic quality to her writing. her ideas are really... dark and twisty, which makes for quite a juxtaposition to how beautiful her storytelling feels. the stories were troubling. 'the boys', in particular, was quite unnerving. while i read the english translation, i feel jordan stump, serving as translator, has done an excellent job as the moodiness and emotion of each story was definitely and strongly evoked. this isn't a book i would recommend for everyone, but if you love short stories, and dark oddities, definitely check this collection out. i really want to read Three Strong Women now. i think the novel form will work better for me, but i was very taken with NDiaye's writing.

from Publishers Weekly, as it sums up well how i also felt:

"Inhabiting the tense, anxiety-riddled interstices where things fall apart, the five stories in this collection don't follow each other so much as collide like objects in a literary maelstrom, achieving a dizzying terminal velocity. NDiaye, who received France's most prestigious literary prize for Three Powerful Women and may be that nation's most startling new literary voice, brings to life an electrifying rogue's gallery of social outcasts, disgruntled wives, and loony strivers. Among them, an Internet-savvy farmer's wife who gives up her attractive son for some steady income, in "The Boys," as seen through the eyes of another child who craves nothing more than to be sold off himself; a penniless actress attempting to leave her abject, devoted husband, in "Brulard's Day," in a swanky alpine resort town; a collision of two old friend who once shared a passion for a popular singer in a decrepit suburb, in "The Death of Claude François." Stump's perfectly calibrated translation captures the rich timbre and fearsome bite of NDiaye's chiseled prose. Empathy may not be NDiaye's strong suit—she prefers a kind of lacerating sincerity—but that may be the price to pay for such lucid and affecting stories. " ( )

I wondered while reading this book whether something might have been lost in translation - that isn't to say that the translation is inelegant or imprecise, but I can see how these stories might be more meaningful in French than in English. The stories are bleak and remind me, for some reason, of Sartre or Camus (which is probably the most pretentious thing I've ever said in any of my LibraryThing reviews). There's a very rigid distance between the stories and the reader - one isn't let in too closely. Initially I was going to say that the strongest story was the third one, The Boys, but now what I really remember is the ending of the fifth and shortest piece, Revelation.

These stories are all about people not connecting. While not a happy read nor an easy read, it is an interesting read and different than many of the other short story collections I've read recently. ( )