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That Time of Year

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." —The New York Review of Books

Herman's wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It's time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman's family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The community he encounters, however, has become alien, practically unrecognizable, and his urgent inquiry, placed in the care of local officials, quickly recedes into the background, shuffled into a deck of labyrinthine bureaucracy and local custom. As time passes, Herman, wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by communal surveillance, strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, and a hospitality that verges on mania.

A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington, Victor LaValle, and Kōbō Abe, NDiaye's novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 20, 2020
      French writer Ndiaye (The Cheffe) serves up a blistering critique of bourgeois French society in this eerie tale. Herman, a Parisian teacher, is on vacation with his family in a remote village, and one stormy evening his wife and child disappear. As he searches for them, his fear for their safety dissipates into numbing frustration as he navigates the complex village gendarmerie and other bureaucracies, where everyone is polite but never truly helpful. He meets Alfred, a low-level bureaucrat who claims Herman will never see his family again unless he becomes a villager, leading Herman to take a room next to Alfred’s at an expensive inn, where Herman gradually learns that the villagers’ elaborate displays of gentility, such as an extended bow from the innkeeper, mask cruel intentions. Everything Herman once found important—his job, family, ambition, even his personal appearance—slides away as he loses touch with himself, “no longer troubling to determine the date.” Ndiaye pulls off a fascinating group portrait of the town, capturing the shifts in behavior of each character in relation to the power they hold or are beholden to. Her chilling tale offers a powerful chronicle of the failure of one man’s will.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from August 1, 2020
      A Parisian family that summers each year in a small village learns the hard way they have overstayed their welcome in this deeply unsettling and slippery novella. On Sept. 1, Herman embarks on a search for his wife, Rose, and their son, who had gone to the neighboring farmhouse to pick up eggs and not returned. Never having stayed past the end of August before, he is shocked by the sudden turn in the weather from sunny and temperate to cold and rainy literally overnight, a pathetic fallacy and our first introduction to the village as a character of menacing proportions, populated by disturbing residents, all of whom slide sideways around Herman's ever increasing anxiety in charming, yet frighteningly empty, ways. When he seeks out the village's mayor to tell him what's going on, he meets Alfred, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who turns out to be a former Parisian who also once stayed past summer's end. Alfred takes Herman on as a project, vowing to turn him into a local, and sets Herman on a path where he must find a way to withstand the unending gray, stormy landscape or simply melt away. As he attempts to navigate the village's internal politics and strangely archaic rituals with Alfred's help, he falls helplessly into its life as if tumbling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, his urgency slowly transforming to inert apathy. When he finally learns what happened to his wife and child, he ends up with more questions than answers. Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style, this slim, sleek story has a veneer of sly sophistication that belies the horror of malignancy within the village and Herman himself. Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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