I really enjoyed this, and wished i had my own copy so i could read it again! It also made me want to read more works by Ndiaye!

I really enjoyed this absorbing account of the rise and fall of a woman chef, who comes from humble beginnings but whose innate culinary skill takes her to the top of her profession. The unnamed narrator, who once worked for her, has his own story to tell and it is the slow, measured way in which the details of their lives are revealed that I found so compelling. It’s a story of obsession, the Cheffe’s with her cooking and the narrator’s with the Cheffe and their personal and professional struggles, their triumphs and their failures are movingly described. We’re never quite sure to what extent the narrator is unreliable which adds to the elusiveness and ultimate unknowability of the Cheffe who remains enigmatic throughout. I don’t think it’s wise to give too much of the plot away, as it’s a slow-burn of a novel and the accumulation of narrative detail over many pages was for me its great strength. An original, clever and beautifully written novel and one which I heartily recommend.

"She thought there was something excessive in the praise people had begun to heap on her cooking.
She found the phrasing of those panegyrics ridiculous and affected, it was a question of style.
She had no taste for preciousness or grandiloquence, and no respect.
She knew all about the force of the senses, after all it was her work to awaken them, and she was always enchanted to see that force show on the diners’ faces, she strove for nothing else, day in and day out, for so many years, virtually without rest.
But the words people used to describe it struck her as indecent.

Elle trouvait excessives les louanges dont on s’est mis à couvrir sa cuisine.
Elle trouvait riducules et affectées les tournures de ces éloges, c’est une question de style.
Nulle, part elle n'appréciait ni ne respectait l'emphase, le grand genre.
Elle comprenait les sensations puisqu’elle s’appliquait à les faire naître, n’est-ce pas, et que leur manifestation sur la figure des convives l’enchantait, c’est tout de même bien ce à quoi elle s'évertuait jour après jour, depuis tant d’années, presque sans repos.
Mais les mots pour décrire tout cela lui paraissaient indécents."

The Cheffe: A Culinary Novel is translated by Jordan Stump from Marie NDiaye's La Cheffe, roman d'une cuisinière, and published as part of Machelose Press's excellent new international library of literature in translation.

It is a rather different novel to the two previous translation of Ndiaye's work I have read, and a hard novel to judge, since it is a victim of its own, cleverly constructed, form.

The novel is ostensibly a verbal biography of a French female chef, known in the book simply as The Cheffe, who rose from simple origins to found one of the most celebrated restaurants's in Bordeaux, receiving a Michelin star. Hers is a story that emphasises the virtues of creationary vision allied with deliberate practice combined with a single-minded, almost obsessive, focus on perfection.

But the form in which the story is told is perhaps as important as the story itself. It is narrated, to an unnamed (and to the reader unheard) interlocutor, perhaps a ghostwriter or journalist, by one of her former sous-chefs, twenty years her junior, who himself was to go on to become a well-known chef, but who now lives anonymously, in retirement, in a boozy French expat community in Lloret en Mer.

"We also love Lloret de Mar’s short winters, even if we pretend to long for the summer , the sunbaked terraces, the gold-tinged sunlit pool, and our constant high-spirited inebriation, we’re more sober in the winter at Lloret de Mar, we go for drives in the unremarkable housestrewn countryside, we take Spanish lessons, we reconvene the book club we’d abandoned in the sunny season."

And indeed there is a, at first seemingly unrelated side story, interspersed with his reminiscences about the Cheffe, as he frets about the approaching visit of his own daughter.

The difficulty with the novel comes because in many respects his tale - which is the book we are reading - contains many of the most heinous faults of bad biography. It is hagiographic; invests minor events with retrospective significance and describes them in exhaustive (for the reader, at times exhausting) detail; highly subjective and often rather speculative; written in opposition to another account which the reader is supposed to have read - here that of the Cheffe's daughter; and, above all, that form of biography, most commonly seen in obituaries, which is as much about the writer as the subject, or rather the writer’s claim to a privileged relationship to the subject.

The Cheffe and his special relationship:

"The Cheffe was fantastically intelligent. How I loved to see her delight in being taken for a simpleminded woman! Our sly, shared awareness of her vast intelligence felt like a bond between us, a bond that I cherished and that she didn’t mind, a bond I wasn’t the only one to feel, since there were others, longstanding acquaintances, who knew just how sharp she was, how perceptive, and who also sensed she wanted to keep that a secret from strangers and meddlers, but I was the youngest, I didn’t know her before, back when she cared less about secrecy, I was the youngest, and the most in love with her, of that I’m sure."

The speculative nature of his account of the Cheffe's origins:

"The things I know about the Cheffe, the things I’m telling you now, aren’t things she revealed to me, they’re things I think I’ve realised on my own."

The daughter and her account:

You’ve met her, you’ve seen that unpleasant, sterile woman, arrogant and vain and now trying to peddle specious anecdotes about the Cheffe to the whole wide world. I hate her, I have no qualms about saying so, I hate her and I have contempt for her, she never deserved to be the Cheffe’s daughter."

Which makes for an odd mix - a almost deliberately uncomfortable read. Indeed, when talking about the Cheffe, he falls into the same trap of ridiculous and affected panegyrics that she so despised (see the opening quote) when critics and customers praised her cuisine.

The plot of her life itself is actually, these flourishes aside, rather straightforward, although Ndiaye does successfully bring together the two plot strands, and it is interesting to see how the Cheffe's downfall begins when she starts to attract celebrities, displacing her longstanding loyal clientele, despite her low prices and no-booking policy:

"Yes, those were the years when La Bonne Heure became a haunt for all Bordeaux’s V.I.P.s. There was no question it was happening, but the Cheffe was slow to face it, not because she had some grudge against the upper classes (she never forgot what she owed the Clapeaus), but because she didn’t want to see that even if she didn’t take reservations and kept her prices within reach of any budget the chic, well-heeled crowd was driving away everyone who wasn’t like them, not that they wanted that or dreamt it was happening, but simply by the inertial force of their authority, of their innate right, of everything that was exclusive and closed about them, everything cliquish and disdainful, the Cheffe knew it, yes, but she was slow to face it."

Overall, it is a worthwhile novel but, as a reading experience, a victim of its own form. 3.5 stars rounded down to 3 as I would strongly recommend Ladivine and My Heart Hemmed In as starting points for Ndiaye before this.