I had thought that the third person narrative voice was prosaic, the most obvious way to tell a story. But it’s like having a dozen eggs in your kitchen. Their ovoid, off-white form is simple; but there is so much that you can do with them.

Fanta, at a distance, she’s like Columbo’s wife from the television series, who is talked about but never seen. Fanta does make two elusive appearances. Towards the start of the second story you hear her voice, anxious for her son, in a phone call with her husband, Rudy. She is heard but not seen.

At the end of the story, it’s the reverse: she’s seen but not heard. She appears almost mythically when she waves to a neighbor. It’s like the beach madonna that closes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – a distant beautiful woman smiling like a Da Vinci and making enigmatic gestures with her hands.

The beautiful Fanta appears as a literary shadow. What fills in her contours is that we know all about her husband. As in…All About Eve…all the dirt. Knowing Rudy, we know what Fanta is enduring.

Rudy and Fanta met when they both taught at a middle school in Senegal. In a miraculous achievement, Fanta had fought her way up from poverty and had become a teacher. But when Rudy is expelled from the teaching profession for assaulting a student, he persuades Fanta to return with him to provincial France where, he assures her, she can teach French literature.

In a move that is typical of Ndiaye, Rudy rewrites his traumatic memories. His recollection of the assault incident is vague. Rudy had convinced himself, and the reader, that students assaulted him. Uncovering the truth results in one more lowering of the reader’s opinion of Rudy. It’s as if a tropical depression comes upon you like the harbinger of an impending storm. Your opinion of Rudy just keeps sinking.

Rudy has misled Fanta about moving to France. He knew that she wasn’t qualified to teach in the French school system. But if he told her the truth, she wouldn’t come.

In an early morning fight, Rudy has yelled at Fanta that she can go back where she came from. But when he is afraid that she might really leave him, he manipulates her again. He volunteers to pick up their son at school later that day. This is something that Rudy rarely does and provokes Fanta’s anxiety in the phone call.

When he picks up the child, he calls Fanta again to say that he’s not bringing him home but to his mother’s for an overnight visit. This is Rudy’s real motivation for picking the child up. He doubts that Fanta would leave him without her son. So he removes the son.

Rudy’s ex-teaching job is as a sales rep for designer kitchens. He got the job as a mercy hire because his mother has an old connection with the owner of the firm.

Rudy drives his mother’s hand-me-down car. There’s a fine minor scene when Rudy arrives at the company parking lot in the beat-up car. The other staff all have great looking cars, many are luxury models. The firm must be doing very well. Rudy’s junk car looks pathetic in this company. He easily ranks dead last among the sales reps.

Rudy’s nemesis among his scant customers is Mrs. Menotti. He’s spent more time on her kitchen remodeling project than he has with any other client. We should spend some time with Mrs. Menotti as well.

Mrs. Menotti is a person of moderate income who has managed to swing the purchase of a small farmhouse in the Gironde in southwest France. That’s bordeaux territory. Must be beautiful. Her neighbors are affluent city dwellers who have bought other modest farmhouses and lavished attention on their renovation. They’re showplaces with entrances that are over-scale and pretentious.

Mrs. Menotti can’t afford expensive remodelling but she does assert her proprietary rights by leveling every beautiful feature in her century-old garden. One by one, careful decisions that have been made over generations to beautify the property are destroyed. She’s one of those people who want to change everything in a new property just to prove it’s theirs.

So she chops down her wisteria and leaves its remains exuding luxurious fragrance for the last time in an alley. Ndiaye writes about that wisteria as if it had a soul. Mrs. Menotti cuts down box hedges that have been maturing for a hundred years. She tears out the rose bushes but then changes her mind and replants them, leaving them in their death-throes. If you love a beautiful garden, as I think Marie Ndiaye does, then Mrs. Menotti is your worst nightmare.

I’ve said Mrs. Menotti can’t afford major renovations to her house. But she does obsess about a remodeling of her kitchen. She takes out a bank loan. She’s dreams about a gorgeous new kitchen to accommodate the wide circle of friends that she doesn’t have.

Rudy, so passive-aggressive about his job, doesn’t recheck his figures for his design of Mrs. Menotti’s kitchen. When he drops over to inspect the completed work, he sees that he has placed the hood off-center from the range at the expensive central work island. The kitchen is a disaster. It can’t be used efficiently. This will cost Rudy his job and his family the mortgage on their pathetic little apartment.

The Rudy character is a book club demon. That’s a character who’s unlikeable. If you’re not a literary reader, then you expect the stories that you read to have characters that you can like. Unlikeable characters can kill the commercial potential of a book and stop its sales dead.

I wasn’t going to tell you this but now I’ve changed my mind. Norah, the the first story, wets herself at times of emotional crisis, even in public. And Rudy scratches his ass compulsively when he is upset…which I find repulsive. Even in front of his co-workers who pretend not to notice…which I find funny.

But they are interesting characters! And Mrs. Menotti isn’t as bad as I make her out to be. Her feelings of insecurity and her confused mind make her seem touching and vulnerable, at least to me.

I’m rooting for Fanta to survive all this. Marie Ndiaye has written a brilliant second story in her collection, Three Strong Women. The barriers between languages and cultures, the challenge of translating sinuous French into foursquare English, fall away to nothing in the face of such brilliance.