{"id":432432,"date":"2020-05-29T14:52:31","date_gmt":"2020-05-29T18:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=432432"},"modified":"2020-05-29T14:52:31","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T18:52:31","slug":"the-cheffe-a-cooks-novel-by-marie-ndiaye-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/05\/29\/the-cheffe-a-cooks-novel-by-marie-ndiaye-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award<\/a>s<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Marcel Inhoff<\/strong> is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection <\/em>Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and <\/em>Our Church Is Here (Pen and Anvil, 2018) as well as numerous poems and essays in German and English. He is currently working on his first novel.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Cheffe: A Cook\u2019s Novel<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Knopf)\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marie NDiaye\u2019s gifts as a psychologically acute observer, a novelist with exceptional skill in depicting characters at an extraordinary depth and vividness have been well observed and described. The Cheffe: A Cook\u2019s Novel<\/em> is one more in a row of widely acclaimed novels about all kinds of characters. This one is about a cook who rose from rags to riches, not without being profoundly uncomfortable about the whole affair. The descriptions of her tumult, her growth, of the way she came to become a cook, through an accident, the sumptuous descriptions of her delight in the art of cooking, of her shame of her upbringing, all of this is masterfully evoked. Except\u2014we see it all indirectly. The Cheffe does not speak with us\u2014we hear the voice of a seemingly devoted narrator who works with and admires her, a factotum, almost.<\/p>\n

It is tempting to read this novel entirely as a biography of the titular cook. After all, NDiaye fills her novel with extraordinary elements. There is the sense of class\u2014the shame of one\u2019s roots, and the quiet, but conflicting pride in having elevated one\u2019s craftsmanship to such a prominent level as the Cheffe has. Cooking is, like writing, a craft that best works with an audience: readers, eaters. And the moment of reading, eating, is central to the book\u2019s most pivotal moments. She finds herself a cook because she works in the kitchen of a rich, strange family, and is suddenly afforded the opportunity to take over duties as head chef. So she, already dissatisfied with the previous cook\u2019s work, works out her own dishes and impresses her employers, the strange Clapeau family. Another such moment presents itself when she cooks refined dishes for her parents, who do not like their daughter\u2019s vaunted cooking skills. At this point, we know that \u201crefined\u201d doesn\u2019t mean \u201cpretentious\u201d in the dismissive sense of the word. The Cheffe has genuinely elevated her craft\u2014and her palette in a way that shifts her sense of place and class so much it creates a rupture with her origins. As Pierre Bourdieu noted about himself: a second habitus has developed, and a shift has taken place, which the Cheffe finds disturbing.<\/p>\n

Without unnecessarily going into details, this is the rift that motivated the self-examination at the heart of some of Didier Eribon\u2019s recent work, most famously the Return to Reims<\/em>, and it is not overall uncommon in literature. What is different here is the way NDiaye presents her female protagonist at the levels of the process\u2014she is the head chef, a position unusual enough and important enough for the book that Jordan Stump\u2019s translation has preserved it as the book\u2019s title. It is an unusual choice\u2014the Grand Robert<\/em>, the Merriam-Webster<\/em> of the French language, recommends turning the customary \u201cle chef\u201d into \u201cla chef\u201d\u2014but that is not an option here. What\u2019s more, the mastery of cooking\u2014and the concept of mastery per se\u2014is still understood as inherently male. 77% of professional chefs in the US are male, while home cooks are majority female. The difference here is written into the title of the book and its protagonist. She is one of modern cooking\u2019s auteur chefs\u2014with specific, painstakingly created, unique signature dishes, and the kitchen doubling as a \u201croom of her own.\u201d<\/p>\n

One has to admire the book\u2019s style, well translated by Jordan Stump, of what could maybe be called exact sumptuousness\u2014a style that perfectly conveys the seductiveness of cooking, the richness of flavors and scents, the attraction of each individual element that composes a great dish, without decomposing into faux-baroque mush, a danger in books about the senses. This skill is heightened by the fact that all this description is wrapped around the simpler, sometimes strangely whiny discursive language of the narrator, a former cook in the Cheffe\u2019s restaurant, hopelessly infatuated with his boss, and still writing, from his elegant retirement home, with a gesture of longing and admiration. His language is halting, self-correcting, searching, and contra many reviews of the novel, it is this narrator that elevates NDiaye\u2019s novel above many of its contemporaries.<\/p>\n

NDiaye has long been suspicious of autofiction and autobiography. Not belonging to the community L\u00e9onora Miano\u2019s Afropeans, or at least not overtly identifying with them, she has often described herself as French, her Senegalese roots not as central to her identity as her interlocutors and reviewers like to make them, at least, not explicitly. In her work, her heritage and background shines through in much of her best work\u2014but how does it relate to the \u201cCheffe\u201d at the center of the work? In what I think is her most underappreciated work, the Autoportrait en Vert<\/em>, NDiaye offers a strange hallucinatory search for a self, an apparition. The book is a challenge to readers, a book at odds with some fashionable assessments of what autofictional literature can, and maybe should, do. It is literally an evasive book\u2014a chase for a phantom.<\/p>\n

In The Cheffe<\/em>, Marie NDiaye writes about a woman who does not want to be defined by her biography, who does not want pictures taken of her face to overshadow the work she produces. The Cheffe wants her work to speak for itself, her dishes to be tasted without being seen as reflections of any specific person. This fact is so central to the book that the narrator begins by explaining it to us before pushing aside any such concerns, before digging up and uncovering the biography of someone who hated being so uncovered. His doubts and thoughts are constantly with us. It is a mistake to read Marie NDiaye\u2019s novel as a psychological portrait of the cook alone or even primarily. It is a portrait of the act of biography, the epistemological violence of dragging an author into a spotlight not sought by them. It is by no means an accident that this factotum, this insistent biographer is male\u2014and that he pushes himself to the front of the picture, so that we never see the Cheffe without also seeing him, and his woeful inner torment. In French literature, this ponderous male voice is common\u2014for example, it is all over Laurent Binet\u2019s HHhH<\/em>, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich and his two assassins. Not content to write the story of the assassination, Binet also writes the story of writing the story\u2014including a discussion of other books being written about the topic and why his project is superior, more truthful, better.<\/p>\n

It is difficult not to read The Cheffe<\/em> as a novel not just about female ambition and success, not just about class and power, but a book about how interwoven our knowledge of the world is with the masculine push to dominate narrative. As in Autoportrait en Vert<\/em>, here, too, Marie NDiaye offers us a chase\u2014and a trap. The Cheffe\u2019s psychology is given to us by the narrator, and the narrator alone. This is not about him being reliable or unreliable\u2014it is about him being a central character of the story. Patriarchal constructions of narrative history as well as masculine dominance of literature mean that we must always be careful around these tales of female lives told to us by men. And where we must be most on our toes is about stories about female relationships with other women, in stories written by men. And so NDiaye includes a difficult relationship, between the Cheffe and her daughter, but makes sure we understand the extent to which this relationship is refracted through the eyes of the narrator.<\/p>\n

And yet, despite all this metafictional finesse, this cleverness, this, even, bitterness of Marie NDiaye, a cheffe herself struggling with the narratives draped upon her shoulders, the book is never bogged down. Often, you have to choose\u2014some of the clever books praised by reviewers and readers for their intelligence offer little in the way of story and characters, falling back on the bare bones of cleverness and conceit. This is not the case here. The book is never less than richly readable, engaging, a brilliant book by a great storyteller and a sharp thinker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and Anvil, 2018) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[71022,10086,6006,71012,41036,37876],"class_list":["post-432432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-cheffe","tag-jordan-stump","tag-knopf","tag-marcel-inhoff","tag-marie-ndiaye","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432432"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432492,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432432\/revisions\/432492"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}