A Bitter Bread 
 "Had she not made of the servant's life a bitter bread?" 
 A more or less random line from the first part of Marie NDiaye's new novel. I quote it for two reasons. One is that the translation by Jordan Stump never quite settles into idiomatic English; one is always aware of a kind of ghost French behind it, as in the inverted word order and strange idiom here. He has informed me, however, in a comment on my Amazon review (see spoiler below) that this is an accurate representation of NDiaye's French. Having read her first novel, 
 Trois femmes puissantes 
 , in French I can well believe it, although this goes further in its deliberate cultivation of ambiguity. Reading in the original, one has only the author to blame; in translation, suspicion falls all too easily on the translator; I apologize to Mr. Stump for the unfairness. It remains a hard book to get into, however, though the style eventually becomes quite mesmerizing. 
 The second reason for choosing this quote is that "A Bitter Bread" is close to my original idea for a title, "A Nasty Taste." The protagonist of the first section, Clarisse Riviere, no longer uses her birth name, Malinka, and has established a separate life in the provinces with husband and daughter. Her mother, who still lives in Bordeaux, knows nothing of this, though Clarisse maintains a regular habit of visiting her on the first Tuesday of each month, becoming Malinka again for that one day only. Years before, when her mother picked her up at school and her friends asked who this woman was, she replied "our servant." [It is not until page 31 that NDiaye indicates why she behaved this way, though readers who know of the author's mixed-race heritage may well guess.] But what leaves the nastiest taste is that for the rest of her life, Clarisse continues to refer to her mother, even in her own mind, as "the servant." So by around page 100, when the thread of the story is handed over to her daughter, the title character Ladivine, we are desperately hoping to encounter someone with more generosity of spirit. 
 The manner changes, but I can't say it entirely loses the nasty taste. Ladivine and her German husband Marko go with their two children on holiday to some cheap destination. I imagine Africa, though we are not told. Ladivine keeps on seeing people who are strangely familiar, and people seem to recognize her. She is also haunted by a large dog, watchful and omnipresent. But by this time the book has taken on distinctly surreal overtones. Some aspects of the situation reminded me of Vendela Vida's recent novel, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, which I doubt NDiaye knows, and there was a distinct reference to the murder in L'etranger, which she surely must. The combination of surrealism and realism makes the novel hard to navigate, but increasingly fascinating. I found I was no longer criticizing the translation, bemused as I was by how the story would play out as the focus shifted yet again to another daughter, another generation. 
 This is an unhappy book about unhappy people, people who hide their emotions because they hide their identity, potentially good people living as losers content with their own mediocrity. It all goes back, I suppose, to the mixed-race parentage that Malinka/Clarisse tries so hard to conceal. Marie NDiaye comes from a similar background herself; I sincerely hope she has been spared such bleakness in her own life. But it makes the subject for a most unusual--if bitter--novel. 
 (view spoiler)[Comment from Jordan Stump: A word from the translator: this is indeed an unidiomatic translation, and I think it has to be. NDiaye's writing is hardly idiomatic in French (it's intelligible to a French person, but no one talks the way she writes, and no one even writes that way). I could of course have produced a translation that reads more like standard-issue English, but that would have been an unfaithful translation. 
 "A bitter bread" is a good example. This is simply a literal translation of NDiaye's "un pain amer," and I realize that that's a dangerous course to take, but there's a reason for it. The image of the bitter bread grows out of an extended metaphor built around the image of Clarisse's mother baking treats for her in an atmosphere of sadness and betrayal; the sadness becomes baked into those treats ("the anger-laced cookies, the cake of tears"), and so any phrase I use to translate the subsequent image of "bitter bread" has to involve baking, or at least food. In colloquial English we have expressions like "eat crow" or "eat humble pie," but those refer to a different experience: not sadness but the awareness of a mistake one has made. There's the image of "swallowing a bitter pill," but a pill is something you swallow now and then; it's not like bread, which you eat every day--and that's exactly the point, Clarisse's mother's life is poisoned every single die. And so I decided to stick to the literal translation; it sounds a bit odd in English, but I think the meaning is clear, and in any case there's no reason why every element of a foreign book has to be made readily-digestible for an English speaking audience. It's not even an unknown phrase in English: it shows up in Gibran's The Prophet. 
 I'm not writing this to defend my translation, but only to make clear that I have reasons--good reasons, I think--for translating this book the way I did. (hide spoiler)]