Marie Ndiyae's THAT TIME OF YEAR (tr by Jordan Stump)

What's that, you say? You're trying to figure out what to read next, but you can't decide if you want an existential and Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, a Lovecraftian horror village with some weird traditions, or a re-read of The Stepford Wives? Problem solved, my lovelies. And it's waiting for you in just 128 little pages.

Marie Ndiaye is a new author to me, but she feels like she could become a favorite based on That Time of Year, which does indeed fit all three descriptions above and is incredibly economical in the way it goes about delivering its dose of the howling fantods.

The novel starts out with a bog standard thriller/crime hook: a man who is regretfully at the end of his vacation suddenly can't find his wife and child, and is baffled at the cheerful unwillingness to help him the locals exhibit. At first this seems like it might just be a case of hostility towards a tourist who has outstayed the tourist season (meaning yes, of course I identified with the unhelpful locals) but quickly we realize that something much weirder is going on. And, of course, nobody is what they seem, no, not even that weird lady who seems to just sit in the window of the nearby charcuterie and stare at the nearby hotel and right into our hapless hero's room all day and all night. For yes, one of the first things that we realize is that this charming village, where our man Herman has a summer home, is a weird sort of mini-surveillance state -- one effected via peer pressure rather than technology -- once the visitors have left for the year.

No one here felt any surprise at what had befallen him, much less troubled themselves over it for long, and when they saw the missing pair on the village streets or, who knows, on the roads in the hills, they would simply say hello to them, without fear or surprise or any particular joy. They might not even bother to tell Herman.

There are plenty of mundane spins that can be put on the state of affairs described in That Time of Year. Who's to say this isn't at least in part a town closing around a distressed woman and child trying to escape an abuser, for instance? Or maybe he's been cleverly fooled into believing he ever had a family and now the scales are falling off his eyes. Or maybe he's gone mad and the villagers are treating him with that special awkward attentiveness paid to the potentially dangerous guest who must be humored for now in the hopes that he'll eventually get better, or be picked up by the gendarmes and taken away.

Making matters worse is the weather, which, apparently, turns gloomy and cold and permanently rainy every year precisely on September first, which only the locals know because no visitors ever say beyond August 31st. It only ever stops raining when summer and the summer people arrive. Ndiyae and translator Jordan stump keep it beautifully ambiguous whether the villagers consider this to be a matter of the summer people bringing the nice weather with them as a sort of reverse Brigadoon, or whether the weather just chases them away at summer's end. By the time the reader is brought to consider it, either seems a reasonable possibility, helped along by bits of dialogue like this, from an interview between an increasingly distraught but also increasingly tired and helpless and permanently soggy Herman and the village's menacingly imposing but strangely impotent mayor:

Have you noticed, Monsieur Herman, you can't even see the hills anymore! By the eighth or ninth of September the horizon disappears, everything's gray; this is nowhere, we're in the very middle of nowhere!

I mean, I've said something similar to the odd visitor overstaying their welcome in my little hometown, where the mountains don't disappear (quite the opposite; they gain a postcard perfect snowy cap and turn the main street of downtown into something everybody wants to photograph but no one ever does successfully) but it does get colder than a well-digger's ass and windier than a the last day of a joint legislative session in Cheyenne and stays that way until... until... Wait a minute, did Marie Ndiaye just disguise my cold and windy hometown as a cold and rainy French village for her novel?

Probably not, but still.

I've definitely watched more than a few summer people start out October as blustery as the weather and kept warm by hubris alone, who by the next May look diminished and miserable and sad and have often convinced themselves that maybe it's okay to be a snowbird after all, though.

Now, excuse me. I think I'm going to have to go hunt down a copy of The Cheffe. Because Marie Ndiyae wants to mess with how I think about restaurants and food, and after this experience I definitely want to let her.