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    Ladivine
    Ladivine
    Ladivine
    Audiobook10 hours

    Ladivine

    Written by Marie NDiaye

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    On the first Tuesday of every month, Clarisse Riviegrave;re leaves her husband and young daughter and secretly takes the train to Bordeaux to visit her mother, Ladivine. Just as Clarisse's husband and daughter know nothing of Ladivine, Clarisse herself has hidden nearly every aspect of her adult life from this woman, whom she dreads and despises but also pities. Long abandoned by Clarisse's father, Ladivine works as a housecleaner and has no one but her daughter, whom she knows as Malinka. After more than twenty-five years of this deception, the idyllic middle-class existence Clarisse has built from scratch can no longer survive inside the walls she's put up to protect it. Her untold anguish leaves her cold and guarded, her loved ones forever trapped outside, looking in. When her husband, Richard, leaves her, Clarisse finds comfort in the embrace of a volatile local man, Freddy Moliger. With Freddy, she finally feels reconciled to, or at least at ease with, her true self. But this peace comes at a terrible price. Clarisse will be brutally murdered, and it will be left to her now-grown daughter, who also bears the name Ladivine, to work out who her mother was and what happened to her. #160;
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781681681818
    Ladivine
    Author

    Marie NDiaye

    Marie NDiaye met her father for the first time at age fifteen, two years before publishing her first novel. She is the recipient of the Prix Femina and the first Black woman to win the Prix Goncourt, the latter being the highest honour a French writer can receive. Longlisted for 2013 Man Booker International Prize, she is the author of a dozen plays and works of prose.

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    Reviews for Ladivine

    3.5/5

    23 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a haunting and somewhat, elusive, nightmarish and enigmatic story which explores the inner worlds of three generations of women in the same family and the secrets that prevent them communicating properly with one another. Like NDiaye's previous novel Three Strong Women it has extended sections that focus on different characters, but this time they are all more closely related.The first section centres on Clarisse Riviere, who has chosen a new identity to distance herself from her past as Malinka, the son of an African servant/cleaner Ladivine Sylla. She visits her mother regularly but keeps her existence secret from her husband Richard, a car salesman and her daughter (who is also named Ladivine). The extended middle section is centred on the daughter Ladivine Riviere, and is largely an account of a nightmarish holiday in an unnamed country which is probably African, with her German husband and two children. The third longer section centres on her father Richard. It is difficult to explain how the plot hangs together without spoilers. There are many dogs in the book, all of which seem to have a mysterious ghostly and symbolic significance, and at several points the plot seems to follow nightmare logic.The whole adds up to a bleak and sometimes gripping and memorable novel, but not an easy one to fully understand or assess.
    • 3/5
      Ladivine, by Marie NDiaye, is an unsettling, mysterious, at times baffling novel that nonetheless fascinates in its depiction of skewed identities and uncertain realities and its attempt to redefine human experience as something fluid and without borders. Malinka is the daughter of a family who immigrated to France. Her father is gone and she’s ashamed of her mother, Ladivine, who collects figurines and works as a cleaner. Malinka grows up, marries Richard Rivière, and transforms herself into cultured, thoroughly European Clarisse Rivière, who, torn and twisted by guilt over how she’s treated her mother, visits Ladivine secretly once a month for many years, over that time somehow managing to keep her two lives and identities separate. Then Richard leaves, and Clarisse, now alone, gradually reverts to her original form as Malinka and takes up with a shiftless drifter with no moral compass and a violent streak. Malinka’s daughter, also named Ladivine, grows up quickly, establishing herself as an exclusive call girl before settling down and marrying Marko and having two children of her own. Much of the narrative’s middle section follows the younger Ladivine and Marko and their children Daniel and Annika as they vacation in an unidentified tropical country, a destination recommended to them by Ladivine’s father Richard. The country they visit aspires to the status of tourist paradise, but the blissful veneer only cloaks, and thinly, a squalid and menacing actuality that Ladivine and Marko are shocked by time and time again. Eventually, after a violent confrontation, they flee the grime and danger of the city for the idyllic countryside and the company of a couple Richard has said will be glad to take them in, but who instead treat them with contempt. Here the story, which all along has hinted at things furtive and obscure within everyday experience, veers more resolutely toward the inexplicable, and yet remains true to its eccentric inner logic. NDiaye’s novel brazenly defies, even shatters, many storytelling conventions, shifting its focus without warning, abruptly dropping plot lines, and often leaving the behaviour and motives of its characters unexplained. The story, rooted firmly in the minds of its characters, presents its peculiar world through their eyes and in unsparing detail. The action moves slowly, as the characters endlessly question their decisions, their observations, their relationships. They relentlessly self-assess and second-guess every move they make, everything they see, and review and examine every word they speak. Most are obsessed with one thing or another and look back on past actions with deep regret. The world they inhabit mirrors our own, and yet again and again, in ways large and small, this world incites puzzlement and confounds our expectations. Daring and original, Ladivine is a novel that challenges its readers to consider the possibility that our experience of life as a straight line built on cause and effect is illusory and that we will probably never truly understand what motivates us to behave as we do.

      1 person found this helpful