The Mumpsimus

Marie NDiaye's 2007 novel Mon coeur à l'étroit  has now been translated by Jordan Stamp and published by Two Lines Press as My Heart Hemmed In . It is a strange, unsettling book, a tale told by a woman named Nadia whose husband receives a ghastly wound that he refuses to have treated, a woman who is being suddenly shunned not only by everyone she knows but apparently by everyone in the city of Bordeaux except for a famous writer she's never heard of, who appoints himself her husband's caretaker. She has an ex-husband who lives in destitution in their own apartment. She is estranged from her son, who once had a male lover (now a police inspector) whom Nadia might have been more in love with than her own child, and who then married a woman and had a daughter, Souhar, whose name Nadia detests. The novel's first paragraph is in many ways its guiding idea: Now and then, at first, I think I catch people scowling in my direction. They can't really mean me, can t...

I've been reading around in Derek Attridge's recent book J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading : Literature in the Event , a tremendously insightful study not only of Coetzee's fiction, but of the implications and structures of writing and literature in the contemporary world. (ReadySteadyBook has posted the first chapter along with a short interview with Attridge.) Each chapter takes a somewhat different approach to reading Coetzee's work, but each approach involves close and specific readings of the texts, readings that are informed by a broad knowledge of Coetzee's nonfiction as well as the historical, political, and social background each book was written and received in. What Attridge has done, really, is provide a model for a kind of literary criticism that is based on some of the tenets of aestheticism and New Criticism , but is balanced with other types of reading and interpreting that bring in various kinds of context: history, politics, economics, e...