★ 2020-07-14
A Parisian family that summers each year in a small village learns the hard way they have overstayed their welcome in this deeply unsettling and slippery novella.
On Sept. 1, Herman embarks on a search for his wife, Rose, and their son, who had gone to the neighboring farmhouse to pick up eggs and not returned. Never having stayed past the end of August before, he is shocked by the sudden turn in the weather from sunny and temperate to cold and rainy literally overnight, a pathetic fallacy and our first introduction to the village as a character of menacing proportions, populated by disturbing residents, all of whom slide sideways around Herman’s ever increasing anxiety in charming, yet frighteningly empty, ways. When he seeks out the village’s mayor to tell him what's going on, he meets Alfred, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who turns out to be a former Parisian who also once stayed past summer’s end. Alfred takes Herman on as a project, vowing to turn him into a local, and sets Herman on a path where he must find a way to withstand the unending gray, stormy landscape or simply melt away. As he attempts to navigate the village’s internal politics and strangely archaic rituals with Alfred’s help, he falls helplessly into its life as if tumbling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, his urgency slowly transforming to inert apathy. When he finally learns what happened to his wife and child, he ends up with more questions than answers. Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style, this slim, sleek story has a veneer of sly sophistication that belies the horror of malignancy within the village and Herman himself.
Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.
Disturbing and heartbreaking…Easily leaps from the subject of exile, to grief, to the comedy of both cosmopolitan and small-town arrogance.” —Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story
“For all its elements of pyschological horror, there is something hauntingly real to NDiaye’s world, where ‘pale, serene, detached, smiling faces hid an inconsolable sorrow.’” —The New York Times
“One of NDiaye’s early texts, [That Time of Year] serves as a site of play for the writer’s longtime interests, from class mobility and assimilation to power and control, and offers an opportunity to survey the development of a writer whose enviably imagined and intelligently executed stories have propelled her into the international spotlight…a haunting lesson about the ease with which a panicked outsider can be lulled into complacency and inaction.” —Bookforum
“The book, which is a rumination on (and a cackle at) the stark differences between privileged urban and disenfranchised provincial life, feels particularly timely in this moment when the pandemic has altered the norms of cosmopolitan living and sent many urbanites fleeing to the countryside. But That Time of Year is no comedy of manners; the headline of NDiaye’s story is not to satirize the crassness of rural newcomers so much as it is about how about how all her characters, when faced with their own specific varieties of isolation are, by force of nature, blind, muddled, incurious, and most of all suspended in their acquiescence.…It is [NDiaye's] light, distant touch and the tradition of experimental writing that turns what should be satire into something more spare and thrilling.” —Abby Walthausen, The Believer
“What at first appears to be a Kafkaesque fable about insiders and outsiders quickly morphs into a metaphysical horror story about the bonds between the living and the dead ... The novel shares some DNA with the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream in its embrace of the fantastic and as a haunting reinvention of the literary horror story ... it left me eager to read more.” —Chicago Review of Books
“That Time of Year is a thriller of unsettling quiet: about how to disappear into the crowd, to erase your otherness and melt into your surroundings.” —Kenyon Review
“A study in claustrophobia, a locked-room mystery of sorts, a ghost story without the ghosts, a parable about tourism and power: all of these describe Marie NDiaye’s slippery, mesmeric That Time of Year.” —Full Stop
“Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style…this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
”Superb…a biting, brilliant exposé on class and privilege, entitlement and hypocrisy, power and control.” —Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
“A blend of psychological realism and the uncanny… 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.” —Barrelhouse
“Marie NDiaye is one of my favorite living writers and That Time of Year is yet another shape-shifting masterpiece. Here the disappearance of the protagonist’s family is not a mystery to be solved, but rather one that gradually opens a portal into social and psychological terror. NDiaye is a virtuoso of the haunted, the alienated, the submerged, the powerfully strange—and this new novel is as thrilling as it is profound.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and The Third Hotel
“If Kafka decided to join up with Jacques Tati to rewrite Shirley Jackson's “The Summer People,” you might end up with something like NDiaye's absurd and dryly comic novel about the perils of staying too long on vacation. That Time of Year progresses with the fluid logic of a dream that, when you scratch its surface, reveals the image of a nightmare beneath.” —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." —The New York Review of Books
“Compelling, inevitable, and, much like the village, easy to get lost in. That Time of Year is a hypnotic novel about the spell cast by a village on its inhabitants, willing and otherwise.” —Foreword Reviews
“NDiaye is writing a literature both innovative and incredible.” —The New Republic
“[NDiaye’s] inspiration lies not in the real world but in nightmares.” —The New York Times
“NDiaye is a rare novelist.” —NPR
“[NDiaye] is an impressive stylist with a strong voice.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“If any contemporary European writer is on the verge of Ferrante-like recognition, it’s NDiaye.” —Flavorwire
