The following piece, a review of Marie NDiaye’s 2016 novel La Cheffe, roman d’une cuisinière, appeared in Music & Literature no. 8 as part of an extensive portfolio on French writer Éric Chevillard. It is made available now to mark the English publication of The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel in Jordan Stump’s translation.
An Impeccable Feast
The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel
by Marie NDiaye
tr. Jordan Stump
(Knopf, Oct 2019)
Reviewed by Éric Chevillard, tr. Daniel Levin Becker
“But what’s the word for a male florist?” my eight-year-old daughter asks. I know that terms like authoress and woman of letters are no longer irregularities in terms of vocabulary, but in terms of judgment? Hard to say. It’s amusing to see, in a Larousse dictionary from the nineteenth century (1866–1879), the following entry: “AUTRICE: Bygone feminine form, now obsolete, of the word auteur.” But there remain so many injustices, so many inequalities, that our sensitivity around the issue is deservedly deep and unforgiving. Gender is no laughing matter, not even for us Frogs (this being the feminine derivation of frogman, naturally). And a lady chef? There is no word for her in French other than cheftaine: not the most appetizing option, but then we all must play the chards we’ve dealt for ourselves. The Swiss and the Québécois have opted for cheffe. Marie NDiaye does too, in The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel.
And for good reason. Cheffe is a perfectly acceptable word, pleasing to the eye and ear as much as it is to our sense of parity. It applies perfectly to Marie NDiaye herself, who has written so many fine books. After Three Strong Women (winner of the Prix Goncourt in 2009) and Ladivine, she offers us another portrait of a woman comfortable in her own skin, in that hypnotic prose that stalks and surrounds its subject as though hypnotizing it, then swoops down and spears it with one or two impeccably chosen epithets. The adjective is the chiseled tip of Marie NDiaye’s slow, majestic language: recall those “hard, efficient mirrors”[1] of Ladivine. It’s a language that moves like an eagle, a shark, a cobra—circling its prey and then striking, suddenly and without error.
Nonetheless, this predation can be gentle, even loving. The characters that Marie NDiaye captures in the snares of her sentences are laid bare without violence. It’s their enigmas that interest her. So it is for the cheffe, whose life is related to us by one of the cooks who worked in her restaurant in Bordeaux. He was madly in love with her, and is telling us her story now from his gilded retirement in Catalonia, a futile milieu he no doubt chose because it represents the polar opposite of his life in the cheffe’s intimate orbit.
We will barely know her as anything besides the cheffe throughout the book, and yet she began her life as a child without qualities, born into a family of several siblings and parents cheerfully resigned to their poverty, living life with an insouciance that may or may not have been ignorance. Placed at sixteen as a maid for a stiff but epicurean bourgeois couple, she discovers a passion for cuisine, “a vocation understood and recognized by each part of the body.” And, just like that, this taciturn, discreet person, hitherto without destiny, knows what to do with her time, what to do with herself. Grace comes to her as intelligence and desire at once. The eroticism of cooking, hinted at by the lexicon of flavor, permeates the book like a warm wave.
There is nothing academic in this writing, and the only starchy thing in it is the spinach crust enveloping the cheffe’s leg of lamb, one of the most renowned dishes at her restaurant, La Bonne Heure. When she cooks, “everything seems self-evident, the swiftness of execution, the meticulous movements, the laconic dance of her tidy little body.” She gathers her hair in a tight bun, pulling back the skin above her skull almost to the point of pain, as though she wants to disappear altogether within the elastic’s embrace. There was a scene like this in Ladivine as well, a book of bodies heavy and dense (an adjective that recurs frequently). This is how Marie NDiaye bounds her characters: as resolute silhouettes, somewhat stubborn but modest all the same.
The other recurring theme of this work is the mother-daughter bond, never a simple one. The cheffe’s daughter will upend her life and that of the narrator, who is also the father of a distant daughter. When the cheffe enters a kitchen, though, she has the feeling of finding at last “a place that would be hers and hers alone.” A room of one’s own, in short—and that it should be a kitchen, the historical locus of female subjugation, gives us an ironic and fertile paradox, not unlike that of creation: generous, given freely, but by way of a “greedy interiority outside of which it is impossible to seriously think or invent.”
Yes, she bears a certain resemblance to Marie NDiaye, this cheffe: a character at once wild and deliberate, whose strange and delicious concoctions are worthwhile without pandering to the palate; who does not lack audacity but knows that “excessive intoxication [can sometimes] drown a recipe in the unacceptable and the absurd”; who wants the fruits of her labors to be tasted but who feels humiliated, even “ravaged by shame,” when she earns a Michelin star.
But there now … would the small matter of a prize awarded in a grand restaurant really be so difficult to swallow?[2]
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
[1] Quotes from Ladivine are taken from Jordan Stump’s translation (Knopf, 2016).
[2] France’s most prestigious literary prize for a work of fiction, the Prix Goncourt—won by NDiaye for Three Strong Women in 2009—is awarded every November at the Drouant restaurant in the second arrondissement of Paris.
Éric Chevillard published his first novel, Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including The Crab Nebula, On the Ceiling, Palafox, Prehistoric Times, Demolishing Nisard, and The Author and Me.
Daniel Levin Becker is an editor of The Believer and the youngest member of the Oulipo.