Norah is sitting behind the wheel in a state. Her live-in boyfriend, Jakob, is beside her. The kids, one offspring from each partner are in the back seat. Lucie hers. Grete his.

Norah is a lawyer. We’re in Paris. Jakob has already made Norah late to work with his joking around all morning. She still has to drop the children off at school first. Jakob is never in a rush since he doesn’t work and contributes no income to the household. And now he tells the children in the back seat that they don’t have to put on their seat belts because “it’s just a short trip”. He’s directly contradicted Norah, a stickler about such things, who had just told the kids to put the seat belts on.

Norah’s trapped in her car with someone who she feels has trapped her in a relationship. Jakob’s a loose, free living soul. His attitude towards child rearing is chaotic and open-ended, at least from Norah’s perspective. Norah believes in discipline and order in the household and believes that children need to be set strict limits so they know where they stand. And she resents that she’s supporting Jakob and a child who isn’t hers. She doesn’t know how to get out of this mess.

Three Strong Women is a sort-of fiction anthology of three novellas that conjoined, make for one reading experience by French writer, Marie Ndiaye. Norah’s story is told in third person narrative style with a subtle distinction. The story so focuses on Norah and what she is feeling that you could be excused if you thought of this story as being in first person. That’s a gifted storytelling strategy. The text encourages you to identify with Norah. The effect of that identification is that you are convinced through most of her story that Norah’s perspective is correct. A true third person rebalancing of our perspective only occurs as the story is concluding. Norah’s strength lies in her struggle to be more objective, even if that means a direct, painful and confusing collision with her deepest convictions and a reset of what she thinks she remembers.

Most of the story takes place in Senegal where Norah has gone to visit her elderly father. He has summoned her on account of a family problem. Something offbeat happens even in her arrival, which I should have thought stranger than I did at the time.

I can’t tell how much I’m missing by not reading this story in the original French. I’m sure I’m missing something. But I’m one of those readers who compulsively wants to read literature in translation to escape from the confining corral of my own language. I know most readers don’t feel that way.

The offbeat thing that happens is that Norah forgets her father’s address. She remembers the neighborhood so she takes a taxi there. And then she walks around for hours in the sweltering heat trying to locate the familiar looking house. I should have asked myself at the time: What does Norah want to remember and what does she want to forget?

If Norah’s outward level of entrapment is her frustrating relationship with her boyfriend, her deeper level of entrapment is her relationship with her father. Norah’s fought all her life with skill and determination to make something of herself. And she has succeeded as a lawyer. But she seems to have been roadblocked by the most significant men in her life.

The recoil from her father is immediate and visceral. Her father is shabby and he smells. His hygiene is evidently repulsive. But I think the most off-putting thing about him is that he is an old man. It’s scary to confront our parents as elderly. After you’ve struggled all your life to succeed as an adult, you discover that your parent now seems to have been transformed into the child.

Norah’s father lives in a huge hulk of a crumbling house that’s something like a concrete bunker. Her father achieved substantial wealth in the midpoint of his life by investing in a vacation village. But travel trends changed, the village went bust and now he is barely making it in the house that he had built during his salad days.

Family arrangements in the house should creep you out. Norah’s father is a widower from a second marriage to a woman younger than himself. Two offspring from that marriage live largely confined to a bedroom at the rear of the house. It’s like their father has put away his abnormally young children. The house has a hallway of cell-like bedrooms. When her father was wealthier, he had put up many of his extended relations. Those rooms are now empty cubes.

Norah bunks in the only empty bedroom still furnished, which was her brother’s. Sony is in prison, accused of murdering his stepmother. I can’t forget (it’s so weird) that the bedroom has a pile of deflated basketballs piled up in the corner.

I’m imagining Norah staying in her brother’s bedroom and feeling alienated from a family past that she’d rather escape. I can’t say what a French audience would make of all this. Does the story sound more vernacular in its native French than it does to me? Perhaps some of its strangeness resides in the translation and is not evident in the original text. But Norah’s strength in re-imagining her past and setting her present views at a tangent reveal an intelligence, somewhat David Lynch-like, in Marie Ndiaye’s storytelling that I don’t want to do without. From Knopf. Now.