Marie NDiaye is a French national born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France, to a French mother and a Senegalese father. When Marie NDiaye was nine months old and her brother was a small child, their father left home and never returned. She and her eldest brother, Pap NDiaye, were raised by their single-teacher mother in Fresnes and Bourg-la-Reine, both Parisian suburbs. Pap NDiaye later became a historian and politician, serving as France’s Ambassador to the Council of Europe since 2023.
After finishing primary and secondary school, NDiaye went to the Sorbonne University in Paris to study linguistics. She then received a grant to stay at the prestigious French Academy Villa Medici in Rome, where selected people pursue their creative or academic pursuits.
NDiaye started writing in her teens. Her first novel, “Quant au riche avenir”, was published in 1985 when she was eighteen. She is a prolific writer, widely read and critically acclaimed. She has written adult and children’s novels, short stories, plays, essays and screenplays. She was awarded the Prix Femina in 2001 and the French Prix Goncourt in 2009. Her stage play, “Papa doit manger”, became part of the repertory of the distinguished Comédie Française in 2003. She is the only living woman playwright to have this honour bestowed. In 2015, she received the Gold Medal in the Arts, awarded by the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts.
Marie NDiaye left France in 2007 after Nicolas Sarkozy became president of France and lived with her husband and three children in Berlin, Germany. She has returned to France but still often visits Berlin.
The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel, published in French in 2016 and English in 2019, is a story narrated by the unnamed, now-retired male cook, the former Cheffe’s kitchen attendant, friend, confidant and unrequited lover (twenty years her junior). It is about the life and career of this remarkable woman, Norah, referred to throughout the novel as The Cheffe – a title chosen by her narrator out of respect – who succeeds in rising to the top in a sphere dominated by men.
Norah, the eldest of her siblings, was born in the early nineteen fifties in Sainte-Bazeille, a commune in the Lot-et-Garonne department in southwestern France. She is from a humble family of agricultural workers who sometimes made her work in the fields with them despite her being underage. As a teenager, her parents sent her to the Clapeau, a bourgeois couple in Marmande, seven kilometres from Sainte-Bazeille, to work as a maid.
When the Clapeau’s cook refuses to go with them on holiday to their summer residence, the young girl is temporarily promoted as a replacement. From the very first meal, she asserts her original cooking style, showcasing her pure, simple, yet excellent culinary skills. This method will be the basis for her future menus in “La Bonne Heure”, the celebrated restaurant she will later open in Bordeaux.
The novel’s main subject is French cuisine and how it can be heightened to refined perfection and uniqueness, which French chefs always strive to reach as part of France’s proud culinary tradition. The detailed descriptions of the creative, exclusive dishes, their harmonious configuration, their flavours and aromas are appetisingly illustrated and emphasise the Cheffe’s devotion to her cooking.
The Cheffe is shy, reserved, discrete and solitary. She is not interested in the acclamation of her bourgeois clientele. For her, the constant search for accuracy, a quest for refinement, quality and the creation of new dishes, plus preparing them with minute care, is spiritual, on the verge of a sacred act devoid of any self-interest or praise from others. She wants her food to be appreciated for its subtlety and creativity, regardless of who made it. She is a genius who prefers and intends to be shrouded in secrecy. Despite being clever, she does not defend herself against people who consider her unintelligent.
No one will ever know the modest Cheffe, as she keeps to herself and remains a mystery throughout the story, even to her faithful narrator, who is close to her. Being so austere, like a nun dedicated to her task, the Cheffe feels embarrassment and guilt, almost like Catholic self-flagellation, to be recognised and awarded a star by the famous French culinary Guide Michelin.
The only time the Cheffe shows concern for something other than her kitchen is her care for her daughter. Her weakness and excessive, irrational guilt toward her daughter makes her an uncaring, heartless person. She is a spoiled daughter who meddles with her mother’s work and, through psychological manipulations, ruins her gifted mother’s dedication to culinary art. She destroys her mother’s long life of work, commitment and ambition to excel and prove herself in her field.
It is a compelling story, beautifully and masterfully written in its original French version. The book has no chapters but flows like an unstoppable river with very long sentences reminiscent of the nineteen-twentieth-century French novelist Marcel Proust’s method of writing and also typical of Marie NDiaye’s writing style. Like several of her works, “The Cheffe” explores themes of affinity, quandary, tautness, reflections, and ambiguity in relationships, all interwoven with compassion.
In one of her interviews about “The Cheffe”, Marie NDiaye says: “I am very passionate about cooking: the rituals and the history, and I am always happy when cooking. It is an essential activity in my life. But I could never be a chef. I do not have the skills nor the drive to acquire those skills. I am more of a dilettante in the kitchen with a passion.”
She also adds that all the recipes in her book are unauthentic and only the work of her imagination.
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