The Witch

by Marie NDiaye

Literary Fiction

Magical Realism

144 Pages

"The Witch unsettled me in the best possible way. NDiaye writes with this cool, precise dread that gets under your skin—I finished it in one sitting and immediately needed to talk to someone about it."

Synopsis

Lucie comes from a long line of witches—powers passed mother to daughter for generations, frequently hidden or repressed to appease the men who feared them. Trapped in a cruel marriage in a small French town, Lucie weeps watery tears of blood and bides her time. When her twin daughters Maud and Lise turn twelve, she initiates them into their family's peculiar inheritance, against her controlling husband's wishes.

What follows surprises even Lucie. Within months, Maud and Lise are crying crimson tears, their powers growing faster and stronger than anything their mother or her foremothers ever achieved. The gifts that were suppressed for so long in Lucie bloom freely in her daughters—opening them to liberation and euphoria beyond anything she can fully imagine or follow.

Equal parts dreamlike and disquieting, The Witch is a fable about what mothers give their daughters and what daughters do with it. NDiaye—one of France's most celebrated contemporary novelists—renders the terror and precarity of motherhood with simmering precision, and the ache of watching your children become something freer, and more dangerous, than you ever were.

Our Take

NDiaye is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European fiction, and The Witch showcases what makes her so singular: a prose style that is cool and precise on the surface and roiling with unease underneath. The magical elements—crimson tears, inherited powers, daughters who outgrow their origins—are presented with complete matter-of-factness, which makes them land harder than any amount of gothic atmosphere would. This is magical realism at its most disciplined.

The novel's emotional core is the specific grief of a mother watching her children surpass and leave her—amplified here into something almost unbearable by the supernatural stakes. Lucie initiated this. She gave her daughters the tools for their liberation. And now she must contend with what liberation actually looks like when it belongs to someone else. That tension is rendered with extraordinary precision and without easy resolution.

Readers who loved The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter or Beloved by Toni Morrison will find NDiaye operating in comparably charged territory. Also a powerful pairing with The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns for readers drawn to dark, feminist fables with supernatural edges. Brief, devastating, and not easily forgotten.