Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year: Jordan Stump and Imani Perry
4:30 pm PT | 5:30 pm MT | 6:30 pm CT | 7:30 pm ET
Virtual Event
Jordan Stump joins Imani Perry to present Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year(opens in a new tab). Co-presented by Community Bookstore(opens in a new tab).
This event will take place on Zoom. Register on Community Bookstore’s website.(opens in a new tab) And while you’re there, order a copy of the book(opens in a new tab).
About That Time of Year:
Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The community he encounters, however, has become alien, practically unrecognizable, and his urgent inquiry, placed in the care of local officials, quickly recedes into the background, shuffled into a deck of labyrinthine bureaucracy and local custom. As time passes, Herman, wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by communal surveillance, strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, and a hospitality that verges on mania.
A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington, Victor LaValle, and Kōbō Abe, NDiaye’s novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird
Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine. His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Breathe: A Letter to My Sons.