VENGEANCE IS MINE by Marie NDiaye

The translator of this novel tells us that Maitre is the title given to French lawyers, and Maitre Susane is the main character here.  She agrees to take as a client a woman, Marlyne, who drowned her three children, but that crime does not seem to bother her as much as the fact that she may have met the woman’s husband as a child, and that encounter may not have been totally innocent.  Remembrances of this encounter causes a rift between Maitre Susane and her parents—her father in particular—the reason for which I never grasped.  Another case she is pursuing is that of her housekeeper, Sharon, who is seeking legal residency status.  Sharon is an enigma in more ways than one but stubbornly refuses to provide her marriage certificate to Maitre Susane, who requires that document for Sharon’s case.  These two puzzles are never resolved, nor is the title, as far as I am concerned.  Vengeance is whose and for what?  I have to say that I was intrigued by Marlyne the most, especially the two radically different reasons she gives for murdering her children.  Both motives are equally unhinged, and in one description of her motivation, she describes her crime as premediated, but in her other explanation, she claims that she had no plans to kill them until the moment that she decided to do it.  She is a monster but still a more fascinating character than Maitre Susane.