Li’s fictional tale was inspired by the real-life story of Berthe Grimault, a 14-year-old French peasant girl, the publication of whose novel Beau Clown (1957) saw her hailed as a literary prodigy. Do-gooders awarded Grimault a place at a genteel English finishing school in the hope of further advancing her faculties, but there it was discovered that she was an illiterate fake. How on earth had she managed to fool everyone? Well, three years earlier, the notorious success of 19-year-old Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954) had kickstarted a fad for talented teenage authoresses, of whom Grimault was the latest incarnation. All this is to say that when the French writer Marie NDiaye published her debut novel at the tender age of 17, she was stepping into a niche, but noted, tradition of Gallic female literary precocity.
The story of how NDiaye found a publisher is every bit as remarkable as the scenario that unfolds in The Book of Goose. The die was cast when NDiaye’s mother gave her 10-year-old daughter a child-size typewriter. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision, NDiaye told Aurélie Maurin in an interview published in The White Review in 2012, more an involuntary reflex: ‘When someone gives you a typewriter, what else is there to do but write?’ Over the next six years, she honed her skills, initially mimicking the styles of the books she was reading, but eventually finding her own voice. In 1984, when she was 16, NDiaye mailed copies of a finished manuscript to three Paris publishing houses, including Les Éditions de Minuit. The very next day, its publisher, Jérôme Lindon – whose authors included Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras – was waiting outside the teenager’s lycée with a contract in hand. Quant au riche avenir was published the following year. Unlike Grimault or Agnès, however, NDiaye was very much the real deal.
Born in Pithiviers in 1967, she grew up in the Paris banlieues. Like many of the female characters who populate her novels, she is biracial – her mother is French and her father is Senegalese – but, because her parents separated shortly after her birth and she didn’t see her father again until she was 15, NDiaye identifies as French, not French-Senegalese. ‘I was 22 when I first visited Africa,’ she told the New York Times in 2005. ‘It was as foreign to me as China or India.’ Her second novel, Comédie Classique (1988), was composed of a single sentence - a feat later emulated by Lucy Ellman in her 2019 Booker-shortlisted novel, Ducks, Newburyport – and won her further acclaim, proving her debut hadn’t just been a fluke. She continued to publish excellently received novels, short stories and plays throughout the 1990s, then garnered further success in the early years of the new millennium by accumulating a series of prestigious prize nominations and wins.
Rosie Carpe was awarded the Prix Femina in 2001 and, in 2009 – for Trois femmes puissantes – NDiaye became the first Black woman to receive France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Four years later, in 2013, NDiaye was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, at that point still operating under its original rules, which recognised a writer’s entire body of work rather than just a single novel. In 2016 – the year the rules were changed so the international award mirrored the original Booker Prize – NDiaye found herself nominated again: this time for Jordan Stump’s elegant and precise English translation of Ladivine (2013).