He'd worked so hard at persuading himself of the contrary that he was no longer sure what was true and what wasn't.

The first woman of color to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Marie NDiaye is certainly a gifted, uncompromising writer. Her collection All My Friends was my first foray into her work, and, in some ways, the stories there are stronger than the "novel" Three Strong Women; however, similar themes of how isolating intimacy can be, how identity is subsumed beneath others: at the personal and cultural level, and how marginal experiences are as critical to listen to as those we encounter in more mainstream fiction are present throughout NDiaye's work.

Similarly, her use of narrative skill is impressive: using both free indirect style and figural narratives, NDiaye is able to begin—perhaps paradoxically, but this is her talent—both at the highly specific and at the very general levels. Slowly, in the course of the narrative, NDiaye's omniscience and increasingly nuanced use of the figural allow the reader to be both welcomed into each characters' mindsets while at the same time ejected from them.

This can make for frustrating reading, and, indeed, as some reviews have pointed out, the second part (which is the longest part and gives portraits of several woman from the perspective of a male character, Ruby, especially his wife, Fanta) can be downright infuriating to read. This is not necessarily because of subject matter, but more due to NDiaye's use of style to mimic the repetitive and flickering states of our consciousness: so when Ruby muses for ten pages—all of which take place in the time span of placing a telephone call and letting it ring without answer—about the words he said (or didn't say) to Fanta, about his meagre, unimpressive job, about how inconsequential he feels as a man, as a husband, as a father, as a son, this is NDiaye doing what she does best. In essence, she is rendering our thought processes as they take place but stretching them out in a linear fashion, unlike someone like Woolf for whom imagery and rhythm are more important. Indeed, when NDiaye makes use of symbolism it is often heavy-handed, with symbols such as buzzards, poinciana trees, crows, and so on to make appearances on nearly each page as if to stress and overemphasize their import much to the narrative's discredit.

As interconnected stories, these three pieces work rather well, but as a novel it simply doesn't have the cohesion to be read in that light. The first piece deals with a thirty-something woman named Norah who has come from Paris to visit her father in Dakar at his insistence; while there, she is forced to come to terms with not only the memories of his brutality and neglect in her youth—and how this figures in his current life, and thus hers, at present—but also her dissatisfaction with motherhood and the more independent life she desires for herself and which her job as a lawyer serves to underscore. The second piece centers on Rudy and is linked to the first by way of a Proustian nom de pays; here, NDiaye captures very brilliantly a man in the midst of a midlife crisis: Rudy's crisis is as much one of masculinity as it is of nationalism and imperialism, a meditation on how the oedipal relations of one's youth are prefigurations of how one's adult relationships will form in terms of dynamics and roles. The last piece, which is perhaps the most affecting, concerns Khady's plight after her in-laws, with whom she has been living since her husband's death, force her to leave as she is childless and without a dowry. Khady's narrative is linked by way of a nom de famille to the second piece in Three Strong Women and is as much about the confines of cultural expectations of femininity as it is about the internalization of gender roles which cause women to view themselves solely in relation to men, as future mothers, and in economic rather than loving structures of kinship.

To me, the translation of puissantes from the French title should be rendered as "powerful" rather than "strong" women; in addition, the blurb from the French edition of the novel is misleading in its statement: trois femmes qui disent non. NDiaye is not concerned with saying no or with resistance, or, rather, if she is, it is about the futility of these desires in a world and in relations that prevent flight and instead see the individual trapped in existential circumstances which they must accept in some way in order to quell their uneasiness, their loneliness, and their alienation. And this is indeed her strong suit. Although the book is more likely a three-star book, the project itself and the sheer originality of NDiaye's vision here are worthy of four stars, in my view, without question. She is definitely a writer to watch. ( )

On the face of it, this is a similar sort of deal to Gertrude Stein's Three lives: three novella-length pieces, each involving a strong female character. But it's also a kind of novel, as the three stories intersect in ways that aren't entirely straightforward and logical, and in places verge on the mystical. All three straddle the physical and cultural space between France and Senegal: in the first, Paris lawyer Norah is summoned to Senegal by her estranged father to deal with the aftermath of a family tragedy; in the second, we are in a small French town watching the life of disgraced schoolteacher Rudy unravel as his Senegalese wife Fanta remains enigmatically offstage; in the third, the young widow Khady Demba gets caught up in the horrors of the illegal migration trail across the Sahara to Europe.

NDiaye's women are "strong" not in the conventional sense of being able to exercise power, but in the more particular sense that they have to have the moral strength to deal with more than their fair share of other people's (read: men's) problems without unravelling themselves. It's a book that's packed with anger at the injustices of the world and the selfishness of men and Europeans, and occasionally it seems to lose its direction in all that rage, but most of the time NDiaye's writing is sharp and devastating: it's well worth hanging in there through the woolly patches. ( )

These sentences are way too convoluted for this dyslexic's tiny mind.

An absolutely excellent work of literature. Three stories, that vaguely overlap, tell of different perspectives of isolation, identity and migration. Told between Senegal and France, there is a dream-like quality and a biting reality to each tale. Occasionally funny and grim, the characters are the driving force here; each is uniquely compelling. This is a wonderful book, only really let down by the dreadful, meaningless title (an exercise in bad marketing?). ( )

It's a real shame this fell through for me, because I found the actual content of the stories interesting, but the writing style fell utterly flat. The style felt ponderous, repetitive, and slow. I'm not sure if this was because of the translation or what, but I gave up after the first story. I prefer a much lighter, snappier style. ( )