Trois femmes puissantes(translated as Three Strong Women) won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, with the result that it shot to the top of the French bestseller chart for that year alongside novels by Dan Brown, Anna Gavalda and Marc Levy. Its author, Marie NDiaye, was already a well-known novelist and playwright whose work had received much scholarly attention and acclaim, but the media coverage and extensive marketing that accompany the prize offered her latest work for wider consumption. The book is not exactly a novel: it is composed of three stories, loosely linked by some minimal recurrence of characters from one to the other, and by the volume's striking if somewhat misleading title. Each story does indeed contain a woman, but the relevance of the adjective ‘powerful’ is not immediately apparent, and in the second story a male protagonist takes centre stage. The story that most clearly fits the title, and which has received the most attention from press and readers, is the third, the story of Khady Demba. Its heroine is a young widow in an unnamed African country who is sent by her family-in-law on the illegal migrant trail to Europe. Dramatic, moving and already topical (though its topicality would intensify a few years later, with the refugee crisis), this is the most accessible of the three stories, and the one that has divided critical opinion precisely because of its departure from the author's characteristically enigmatic, non-realist writing style towards narrative that is more straightforwardly mimetic. It is on this story that I want to base my two readings.

First I propose to read the story as a ‘middlebrow reader’, that is, as myself in non-academic mode, reading for pleasure, interest and curiosity. Then I will read the same story as a literary critic, analysing technique and taking account of existing critical studies. There will inevitably be overlap, for our various ‘selves’ intermingle and are far from watertight. But my aim here is to try to understand what academic study often misses or omits, to ‘provide an account of the pleasures of a characteristically middle-brow way of reading’ (Radway, 1997, 12). Literary criticism expands knowledge: it is part of the great enterprise of understanding how we function as human beings, and how language shapes and opens up experience.