Reading The Witch by Marie Ndiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, felt like being conscious in an early morning dream—a dream in which every scene seems to make complete sense but they switch too fast. You want to get out, but can’t. You’re merely an observing eye, an occasional participant even, who’s stuck with the weird but compelling narrative. You’re restless to wake up but, again, you cannot. And when you do, the remnants of the dream haunt you for a few minutes before they fade into oblivion as you move on with your day.
Shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, though originally published in 1996, The Witch is the story of an unhappy woman, Lucie, initiating her twelve-year-old twins, Lise and Maud, into witchcraft away from the eyes of her husband, Pierrot. On her maternal side, passing on this occult craft to the next generation of girls is the law. What this craft is and how it is taught remains unknown to the reader, who intuits that the twins learn it by simply observing their mother. Lucie’s mediocre capabilities are known to her seemingly omnipresent nosy neighbour, Isabelle, for she tried to initiate her into the craft when she moved into the suburban neighbourhood. Isabelle, however, keeps exploiting her powers only to look at her good-for-nothing son Steve’s future.
Pierrot, “a talented and permanently worn-out sales agent,” runs away with Lucie’s financial inheritance, and builds a new family elsewhere. Maud and Lise flee the nest as they learn about their capacity to shapeshift. In the process of chasing her husband to get back the money while living in an empty house, Lucie makes up her mind to fix her parents’ marriage. Later, she finds herself teaching at her neighbour’s institute, Isabelle O.’s Women’s University of Spiritual Health.
In this book, the title presumably refers to the narrator, Lucie, who lives a mediocre and unhappy life and grapples with the loss of all her relationships within a short span of time. She is an average witch whose “talent was slight, apparently just strong enough to keep the gift going, to pass it along” (p. 6). She calls her abilities laughable, for they allowed her to see trivial details, nothing significant. This is paradoxical, however—because such insignificant details in her magical vision allow her to find her husband and with him her inheritance.
In Lucie’s family, witchcraft isn’t something that’s been considered as a gift or matter of intergenerational pride. Lucie’s mother was a powerful witch who denied using her powers and grudgingly passed them on to her daughter. Meanwhile, Maud and Lise show complete indifference towards witchcraft, calling it lame. Once they absorb the knowledge, it becomes only a path to freedom, or so their mother interprets. Lucie wonders if her daughters would even consider passing the gift on. Reading such varied experiences made me feel as if the author is talking about the gender roles that are passed on, often with a hint of rebellion and defiance, from mothers to daughters. It becomes difficult to interpret if these powers work for the women or against them.
Ndiaye portrays a spectrum of unhappy women beyond Lucie: Her neighbour Isabelle who cannot bear her marriage and the son borne of it; her mother who is divorced and is trying to settle with another man who denies any awareness of her witchcraft; her mother-in-law, “Mama,” who feels oppressed by both her children and seems to be happy when her daughter gets pregnant only because she can now raise another child; and her pre-teen daughters, meanwhile, seem “to inhabit a distant, hypothetical world, the world of their future glory, where nothing of the present had a place, was simply to be considered with detachment or scorn and efficiently chased away with a pretty resolute gesture” (p. 38).
Motherhood and witchcraft are certainly entwined in this work, but one is left to wonder: What does freedom mean or what makes a woman free? Such is the conundrum, because free and confident women do not seem to care for the occult gift as much as Lucie does. Is freedom a choice, a rebellion, or a sacrifice here?
Freedom looks like agency, an agency to choose: Lucie’s mother chooses to divorce her husband, Isabelle chooses to leave her husband and son behind, Mama’s daughter chooses to abort her pregnancy, Maud and Lise choose to flee home. None of these women seem as unhappy as Lucie or Mama, who derive their identity and purpose from their relationships. They have nothing left when they are abandoned.
Patriarchal society across the world has referred to women beyond its understanding as witches since time immemorial. If, at one point in time, witchcraft indicated a form of exclusive knowledge passed down within families or through tutorship of carefully selected pupils, today it is still used by many to describe feminists or simply angry women who defy convention. When Ndiaye parallels Lucie’s inherited practice with a well-performed scam that results in a series of images of police, jail, contempt, and fire, it leads to nothing, as if the entire story reflects Lucie’s life—weird, complicated, and insignificant.
In other words, reading The Witch leaves one with more questions than it resolves. The prose is compelling, reading almost like a psychological thriller as Lucie moves from one place to another to fix one thing after the other, all before she finds herself at Isabelle’s institute, faking her powers in front of students. She says, “I told myself, I make a better professional fake than a real witch.” She adds, “I began to doubt that I’d ever possessed any gift other than fabrication, that the kind of power the women of my maternal family thought they enjoyed even existed” (p. 116).
Despite the clarity of the writing, the scenes leave many loose strings, resembling dreams—or in this case nightmares. The novel is short and sharp but ends up being an unhappy woman’s lament which doesn’t engage the reader: Despite her travels, there’s hardly any character development in Lucie or indeed agency; she fades in her own telling of the story. The Witch brings to mind books like The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2007, translated by Deborah Smith in 2015) or All the Lovers In the Night by Mieko Kawakami (2011, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd in 2022), novels which also have mediocre, unhappy protagonists fading away from their life and a narration that is both detached and distant. But what these other texts lack in movement is made up by the introspection in the narration, which makes their horrific or absurd endings bearable, even evoking empathy. In The Witch, Lucie at best evokes pity and discontent.
Perhaps even in this the book succeeds—because what else can mediocrity bring beyond pity? This doesn’t change the fact, though, that it alienates any reader seeking emotional and psychological depth. Even the novel’s rather interesting themes—motherhood, freedom, witchcraft, family life divided into love and betrayal—aren’t satisfactorily explored.
The more you think about this novel, then, the more you might get tangled in interpretations that cannot be substantiated by the text. Stay open, expect nothing—or maybe betrayal, if you feel every text should be worth your time even when you disagree with it.