NDiaye's blank-riddled surfaces can be used in all kinds of astonishing ways. People bring to their fantasies about these chopped-up tales and yanked-out characters a great deal from their own lived experience, prejudice and, perhaps, trauma. There is no universal reader. The fact that I have a Cornish mother (whose Greek father abandoned her when she was eight), a West African father (whose brother was sacrificially murdered at the age of twelve), and was brought up with my two older sisters in an almost exclusively white, working-class town in the northern provinces of a northern European country cannot help but inform much of what I ‘recognize’ (interpret, smell, hallucinate) in the work of Marie NDiaye. And yet these are just a handful of the myriad reasons I may consciously or unconsciously believe that I am well-positioned to ‘talk to the blanks’. In my experience, all of NDiaye's usually obsessive admirers, no matter how intellectually sophisticated, tend to speak as if her writing is being directed at them, as if they have been equipped with the gift of sensing what is ‘really’ going on beneath her enigmatic surface. These readers are variously gendered; they occupy different ages; they live out a range of physical, mental and emotional disabilities and sexual preferences; and they experience the often violent mystery of ‘race’ inside differently marked bodies. I have watched them, in fascination (and usually in a seminar room), arguing passionately (and often making excellent cases) about the obvious reason for Ange's wound; about the malevolence – or not – of the femmes en vert; about whether or not ‘Fanny’ is ‘black’ (or ‘brown’ or ‘yellow’), and why such a question could possibly matter.