Translated by Jordan Stump. San Francisco, CA: Two Lines Press, 2020. 128 pages. $19.95.
Marie NDiaye’s latest novel to be translated, That Time of Year, appears to be a relatively straightforward thriller: Herman’s wife, Rose, and his unnamed child go missing during their vacation after staying past the end of tourist season, and it’s up to Herman to determine their whereabouts. But by shrouding her relatively simple narrative in a few compelling dichotomies—town and city, belonging and otherness, remembrance and forgetting—NDiaye constructs a suspenseful, surreal, and nightmarish novel. Its sense of dread is apparent just nine pages in, when, not long into his search, Herman correctly suspects that “by waiting one day too long to go home and thus breaking with a ten-year habit, by letting September come to them when September was a month they knew only in Paris, he and Rose had laid themselves open to unknown tribulations they might not be strong enough to withstand.” As he remarks later, he and Rose “had no sense of what fall means here.”
On the first day of September, the vacation village transforms: the friendly faces of the merchants assume a cold and mocking formality; the warm, balmy weather gives way to unrelenting rain. Struggling through the weather, Herman goes from house to house but is unable to convince any of the villagers to help him in any tangible way. NDiaye underscores Herman’s outsider status, and makes it difficult to empathize with his urban narcissism, as he makes it “a point of pride to behave with the slightly superior civility he thought the only suitable stance for citizens of the capital” and grows increasingly demanding with the resistant villagers. When Herman meets Alfred, one of the city’s officials and the only other former Parisian, he learns that no one will help him so long as his origins remain in the public memory. As Alfred tells him:
You’ll need a great deal of patience, a delicate touch, and you’ll have to discreetly work your way into the life of the village, become a villager yourself—invisible, insignificant—and above all erase any memory of the fact that you’re a Parisian who’s stayed after summer, which is to say an intruder, who in theory has no right to see something that’s none of his business, that never interested him before, that we’d rather he know nothing of: the long, springless winter existence that begins here with the month of September.
Thus begins Herman’s quest to assimilate to the culture of the village, to erase the fact that he had ever been Parisian. The novel takes on a certain stealthiness, with Alfred—and the reader—chastising Herman whenever he inadvertently reminds the villagers that he is not like them. That Time of Year is a thriller of unsettling quiet: about how to disappear into the crowd, to erase your otherness and melt into your surroundings.
Herman’s integration happens rather quickly—the narrative only takes place over the course of a few weeks—and the village’s communal amnesia regarding Herman’s past life emerges unsettlingly fast, imparting an unnatural, otherworldly quality to the flow of time in the village, not unlike the island of the lotus-eaters. In just a few short weeks, characters who were cold to Herman for his perceived dissimilarity treat him as if they’ve been friends for years. Herman himself adjusts so quickly to the slow, restful pace of life in the village that he is almost unable to continue his search for his family. After his friend spots the elusive, busy mayor, to whom Herman has been so desperate to present his case, Herman doesn’t even go after him.
Several of the villagers that Herman befriends are themselves trying to escape the village and ingratiate themselves in the nearby city referred to only as “L.,” leaving Herman in the paradoxical position of becoming an insider in a group whose members are trying to leave. One of the villagers, Gilbert, even refuses Herman’s request to forget he was a Parisian: in fact, Gilbert hopes to use his connection with Herman to prove his own cosmopolitanism to the district councilor, in an attempt to worm his way into the business school there. By the time Gilbert and Herman make it out to L., Herman’s urge to return to the village borders on a demonic possession, hinting at some of the more supernatural elements of the book—and of his family’s fate.
The novel’s gigantic sense of dread is woven largely by way of its masterful and restrained prose. NDiaye tells Herman’s tale with a stark frankness that allows the reader to notice when specific words are repeated, developing meanings unique to the text. The word “abstract”—from Alfred’s “slightly abstract interest in Herman” to Herman’s thoughts of Rose, at one point, turning “abstract, supplanted by the intense pleasure of attracting the women around him”—comes to signify the strange magic of the village, which snares Herman in its sleepy customs.
Similarly, the word “interesting” comes to suggest the utter lack of interest of the townsfolk in Herman’s predicament. Emphasizing the indifference of the town, Alfred remarks that “there are other things to talk about, every bit as interesting: we’ve just renovated the town hall, everything’s modern and new, as you saw.” The mayor, once Herman finally gets ahold of him, brushes off the case, claiming “there was nothing at all interesting about it, in any sense.” Over the course of the novel, “interesting” inspires a kind of paradoxical apprehension wherever it is read, as if just beneath the surface of the word lie the secrets to the bizarreness of the village. What other horrors could lurk in a town where bureaucratic renovations are more interesting than disappearances?
Even the very structure of the book helps construct its sense of unease. The novel is split into two parts, between which the reader is to understand that some amount of time has passed, as evidenced by Herman’s heightened intimacy with some of the townsfolk. It’s unclear just how much time has passed, however—mirroring Herman’s own disorientation, his growing sense of sloth—and when eventually revealed that it’s only been a week or two, not even long enough for Herman’s boss or extended family to think to intervene, it becomes impossible not to wonder what secret ritual was elided that could have so radically redrawn Herman’s relationship to the villagers.
Playfully, NDiaye asks us what happens when city folk stay in the country past the pleasant season, and are hurled into the much more difficult life of rain, cold, and frost. Village life for Herman becomes a quiet, peaceful haven from the restlessness of Paris, but this life of serenity just as quickly becomes a kind of death, as Rose and the child ostensibly vanish and Herman eerily remarks that “vitality is in no way a necessity” as he recounts all the reasons he prefers the village to Paris. As Herman struggles to keep his family in sight while he is lured by the siren song of the village, That Time of Year emerges as a tale of pastoral idyll gone horribly wrong.