#RivetingReviews: David Hebblethwaite reviews CRAZY GENIE by Inès Cagnati, translated by Liesl Schillinger

Inès Cagnati (1937-2007) was born in France to Italian immigrants and wrote about the lives of rural communities like hers. Crazy Genie (originally published in French in 1976) is the second Cagnati novel to be issued by NYRB Classics in a translation by Liesl Schillinger.

We meet our narrator, Marie, chasing after her mother Eugénie as she walks through the village. Anyone Eugénie passes will not greet her, but instead will stop and stare, and wait for her to pass. They only ever call her Crazy Genie, because she doesn’t talk.

Cagnati’s novel is built around loops, scenes that don’t repeat so much as rhyme, with Marie’s life unfolding in a certain pattern. Sometimes she’ll follow her mother when she goes to work on one of the neighbouring farms, but Eugénie will tell her: “Stop always getting in my hair.” Then they’ll return home, where Eugénie will cry and say, “And me, I’ve had nothing.” Marie will reply, “Me, you have me,” but her mother won’t listen to her. Marie is always one step behind her mother, or to one side of her, never in a place where they can connect emotionally.

Sometimes Marie will visit her grandparents’ house, where her grandfather is forever retreating into his history books. Dreaming of escape is a recurring motif in Crazy Genie, such as the occasion when Marie promises Eugénie that, one day, they’ll leave for somewhere better. It doesn’t move her: “She never responded. I knew there couldn’t be lands where vines grew up to the sky, where you could lose yourself along the banks of streams while hunting wild cyclamens. I just wanted to console her. When you’re little, you don’t know.” As that last sentence implies, even though the young Marie understands conceptually that there’s no magic wand to wave away her circumstances, she doesn’t yet understand what it means emotionally. That will come later.

Eventually, Marie meets and falls for Pierre, who’s in the Air Force and promises one day to whisk her away to the islands where he was born. He describes them in similar terms to the lands Marie once promised her mother, and we understand that they are as elusive.

The structure of Crazy Genie means that we see Marie repeatedly with her mother, her grandparents, and Pierre – with them in physical space at least, but apart from them in other crucial ways. The novel appears to settle into a regular rhythm, but there are moments of trauma embedded within that burst into the narrative as they do into Marie’s life. So the experience of reading Crazy Genie echoes that of Marie herself, and it goes right to one’s heart.

Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite

CRAZY GENIE

Written by Inès Cagnati

Translated from the French by Liesl Schillinger

Published by NYRB Classics (2026)

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David Hebblethwaite is a reader and reviewer from the north of England, now living in the south. He has written about translated fiction for publications including Strange Horizons, Shiny New Books, and The Riveter from the European Literature Network. He also has his own website, David’s Book World.

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