That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye with Patrice Colin Perles Rouge

For the last two months, I’ve felt a disproportionate amount of dread about the approaching season change on top of the very proportionate amount of dread I’ve felt about the state of all other things. But almost without realizing it, we’ve crossed into the next season and, while nothing else has gotten better, it hasn’t at all felt like the march to a “long, springless winter existence” I had assumed it might be. I know it’s early, but I remain hopeful. In Marie NDiaye’s novel That Time of Year, this point of weather change is catalyst for the delightfully strange and ghostly story that follows: not a light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board sort of ghost story, but one like a dream you can’t get out of because someone has stolen all the door knobs.  The verb to haunt has many definitions, but the one I’m most drawn to is this: to stay around, or persist; to remain. There’s much that is haunting about NDiaye’s slim novel. The observations of her characters are precise—holding the novel to