Barrelhouse Reviews: That Time of Year, by Marie Ndiaye
Review by Mike Robbins
Two Lines Press / September, 2020 / 128 pp / Translated by Jordan Stump
This September, Jordan Stump, an award-winning translator, and Two Lines Press bring Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year to an English audience. Originally published in 1994, NDiaye’s novella is at once a blend of psychological realism and the uncanny. A sort of Henry James meets Kafka. The book explores the psychology of Herman, an entitled city dweller, alongside the robotic but wily display of hospitality by inhabitants of a small village. That Time of Year focuses heavily on the theme of isolation and the way it forces people to navigate social systems in order to find help and connection. It also confronts how appearance is often mistaken for substance. What becomes of us, NDiaye seems to ask, when we have no choice but to look below the surface?
Herman, a Parisian schoolteacher, has spent the summer vacationing with his wife and son in a rural village outside of the city. They have done so for the last ten years. When the season ends, Herman and his family dutifully pack their bags and leave; they have never stayed a day past August 31. But this year, for unknown reasons, they linger until the first of September, and the weather undergoes an abrupt change. Instead of the summer green fields and cloudless skies they’ve always known, the place becomes shrouded in fog and heavy with rain and a chill that soaks them to the bone. Then Herman’s wife and son go missing, and he must set out in search of his family. Scared and shivering, he concludes
that by waiting one day too long to go home and thus breaking with a ten-year habit, by letting September come to them where 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. Because what did they know of the fall around here, what did they know of these people’s ways once all the outsiders were supposed to have left? The fact was that outside of summertime they know nothing about the place at all.
It seems Herman has stepped into a sort of temporal Twilight Zone, whereby the village and its inhabitants shift from a carefree environment into a dangerous one when the calendar flips from August to September. The same obsequious hospitality he has always taken for granted turns ominous as he scours the town and interrogates the villagers for clues. How can Herman, a pretentious outsider, penetrate such a close-knit community and unearth the truth about his wife and child’s disappearance? He is utterly helpless and alone, so when the villagers suggest his only option is to do nothing, he must follow their advice. In the process, Herman uncovers revelations about himself and his family that change everything.
Though written in 1994, set in France, and experienced through the eyes of a Parisian, I felt I knew Herman exactly. For example, his first encounter is with his neighbor, a local woman who wears the same apple print dress as all the other women in town, the only variation being colored cords that indicate marital status. Usually, Herman “made it a point of pride to behave with a slightly superior civility he thought the only suitable stance for citizens of the capital, always intent on revealing their sophistication but too fine to make a show of it.” But tonight, he is freezing from the rain and filled with anxiety. He demands that the woman immediately produce his wife and child, since he has concluded without any evidence that they must be with her. The woman, however, tells him she has seen no one this evening, and
rather than rushing right off to try to find where Rose and the boy might have gone, Herman was fixated on getting inside, shoving the woman out of the way if need be, then sitting down for a few moments, he thought, in the kitchen by the stove, where he could dry his clothes and try to calmly question this woman, who would have no choice, but to concede that it was impossible she hadn’t seen Rose and the child that afternoon if Herman could only show her, point by point, as he did with thick-headed students, that her first assertion didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
In this instance, and so many others, I could easily imagine Herman as just another bourgeois inhabitant of New York or DC who vacations in the Catskills or the Blue Ridge Mountains. The kind of man who casually assumes a lack of intelligence on the part of locals who staff grocery stores and wait their tables when he doesn’t receive exactly what he wants, culminating in the inevitable request to speak with the manager.
Herman’s visit with his neighbor sets off a chain of events that forces him into town, where he attempts to navigate increasing levels of local political power. He begins at the gendarmerie (police station), where he receives no help, and then travels to Town Hall to speak with the Mayor because, as Herman says to the receptionist, “It’s urgent. Very urgent.” But the receptionist demurely points out “that every urgent case possessed the same exceptional seriousness in the eyes of the petitioner,” and he is suddenly deflated. He believes himself to be exceptional; he’s not used to waiting his turn. In a twist that’s simultaneously delightful for the reader and flummoxing to Herman, the villagers’ hospitality no longer satisfies his feelings of superiority, but instead seems designed to put him in his place. He concludes that “these people are so considerate, so obliging…They’re holding me captive more securely than they ever could with orders and interdictions.” And yet, Herman is not so easily changed. His pompous entitlement and prejudice are on full display when he’s finally granted a meeting with the President of the Chamber of Commerce and becomes “indignant at the manner of the president whose appearance alone, pudgy and unctuous, seemed to lessen the chances of his case being solved.” In short, Herman is an ass.
As a reader, I never felt for Herman emotionally. In fact, there was a certain pleasure in watching the entire town break him down, not by acts of violence, but rather by converting diplomatic hospitality into a sly retribution for ten years of his self-conscious entitlement. This collective action strips him of any illusions about his own self-importance. That Time of Year easily brings to mind The Castle by Kafka, but with an important distinction: while K is Kafka’s hero-protagonist, often interpreted as a victim of state power, Herman is no such thing. The fact that the reader knows he is a Parisian, filled with a sense of superiority toward the villagers, provides enough context to almost delight in his downfall. I found myself rooting for the villagers as they strip him of his pretentions and dissolve his willful pride with bureaucratic efficiency. And, oh, do they succeed.
Midway through the book, Herman has become a shell of his former self, so diminished by his new experiences that he loses the will to fight. Instead, he concludes “boredom without awareness or resentment slows the mind…[But] you have to accept it, and even deep in an ugly little room, find your way to restfulness, to a sort of dulled larval inertia. Such a good life!” A bureaucracy that, under Kafka’s hand, would elicit a cosmic whimper, through NDiaye becomes a tool for justice, a plausibly deniable way for the villagers to seek recourse against a rich Parisian. An idea that goes to the heart of two questions I had when I first picked up That Time of Year: Why translate this book into English? Why now?
After finishing it, the answer is simple. Though written in 1994, That Time of Year is acutely attuned to the themes of our time. It echoes current conversations around entitlement and privilege and shows how those with money know little to nothing of the trials faced by the poor and working class. At a time in America when those with means are flocking from cities to ride out a pandemic in their country homes, setting up inevitable conflicts with locals, it is clear to me that it currently is That Time of Year, and an English version of NDiaye’s book couldn’t appear at a more important moment.
Mike Robbins is a graduate of Iowa State’s Creative Writing and Environment program. He has received writers’ residencies from Art Farm in Nebraska and the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, where he is now Director of the Writers in Residence program. You can follow him on Twitter @MikeRobbins764.