Product Details
Rosie Carpe

Rosie Carpe
By Marie NDiaye

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Product Description

When pregnant Rosie Carpe, her fatherless five-year-old son in tow, arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her elusive brother, Lazare, the world already seems a plenty confusing place. Could the man who comes to meet her, an elegant black man calling himself Lagrand, actually be her disheveled white brother? Are her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, rediscovering themselves in an outrageous second youth of outlandish affairs, or have they simply lost their minds? And does Rosie have a hope of slipping the sticky grasp of her former employer and seducer, who moonlights as a video pornographer?

If it seems unlikely that the feckless Lazare, missing for five years as he followed his own twisted path, might help, or that carnivalesque Guadeloupe, where murder and mayhem are the natural outcomes of “business ventures,” might be the place for Rosie to find peace, then Marie NDiaye may have a few surprises in store for her reader. Amid the blurring boundaries and shifting values, the indistinct realities and confusing certainties of Rosie Carpe, a love story unfolds, and all that is ambiguous and tenuous–in short, all of Rosie’s world–is underpinned with a measure of tenderness.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1869688 in Books
  • Published on: 2004-11-01
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: .68" h x 5.82" w x 8.06" l, .80 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 310 pages

Editorial Reviews

Chronique amazon.fr
Avant tout, sans doute, il y a une histoire, une vraie histoire, qui dès les premières pages donne envie d'aller jusqu'au bout.

Rose-Marie Carpe naît et grandit en province dans un univers fade et jaune, entourée de son frère et de ses parents. Puis elle arrive à Paris, devient Rosie Carpe, rate ses études et se retrouve à travailler dans un hôtel de banlieue, où elle commence à sombrer jusqu'à ce qu'elle atteigne le "bout du rouleau" et parte en Guadeloupe retrouver un frère aux abois et des parents effrayants.

C'est là que le livre commence, dans un vague aéroport, où Rosie, un enfant à la main, un autre (de père inconnu) dans son ventre, attend son frère. C'est là qu'elle rencontre Lagrand, l'autre héros du livre. La fin, terrifiante, a lieu dix-neuf ans plus tard.

Mais cette vie romanesque aux multiples intrigues et rebondissements n'est que la matière de l'écriture de Marie Ndiaye qui en fait une histoire envoûtante, dérangeante, où tout se passe dans la tête des personnages, dans les descriptions hallucinantes de leurs pensées, leurs craintes, leurs désirs. C'est un livre terrible et, dans le même temps, réjouissant, parce qu'il va au fond des êtres, ne leur pardonne rien, ou peut-être tout. --Régis de Sa Moreira

Review

http://nebraskapress.typepad.com/university_of_nebraska_pr/2009/11/unp-author-winner-of-frances-top-literary-award.html
(Cara Pesek UNP blog )

“NDiaye’s Creative style turns this depressing yet fascinating novel into a page-turner. The strange characters, many of whom are described as having bizarre, transparent eyes, seem somehow to come to life. A sense of unreality, intensified by a persistent yellow hue, bathes and enhances the entire work.”—Jayne R. Boisvert, Multicultural Review
(Jayne R. Boisvert Multicultural Review )

About the Author

Marie NDiaye, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 2009, is the author of seven novels and lives in France. Her novel Rosie Carpe was published in France where it won the Prix Femina in 2001. Tamsin Black is a freelance translator and most recently translated Sylvie Matton’s Rembrandt’s Whore.