Crazy Genie

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village after giving birth out of wedlock—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.

Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms to do what work there is to be done. When farmers and villagers greet her, she says nothing, and keeps walking. Once, she was a lighthearted girl from the best family in the valley; now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits, yearning for her mother to notice her, longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.
Told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice, Crazy Genie is the second novel by Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie, together with her first novel, Free Day, confirms Cagnati's astonishing power as a writer."Part fairy tale, part incantation, this devastatingly beautiful story teeters between innocence and menace. The young narrator must interpret her elusive, impenetrable mother by paying vigilant close attention, and the result is a story of exquisite observation, taut with longing, in a landscape pulsing with terrors real and imagined. I held my breath until the final word." — Sonya Walger


"Inès Cagnati's debut Free Day is the only novel I recommend to everyone I know. I have prayed for another Cagnati translation, and I am grateful Liesl Schillinger has now brought Crazy Genie to us. Here Cagnati summons another unshakable voice to tell a story that is brutal, pure, and alive. Here is the violence of rural poverty and rejection. Here is how imagination survives." — Ashleigh Bryant PhillipsInès Cagnati (1937–2007) was born in Monclar, France, and died in Orsay. The child of Italian immigrants, she became a French citizen but never considered herself French. With a bachelor’s degree in modern literature and a certificate for secondary-school instruction, she worked as a professor of literature at the Lycée Carnot in Paris. Cagnati was the author of four prize-winning books, including Free Day (NYRB Classics).

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of the New School for Social Research in New York City. For NYRB Classics, she translated Inès Cagnati’s Free Day.