The abandon of youth

Irène Némirovsky’s life has itself become the stuff for a novel. Her early life in Paris, after the family moved from Russia, her subsequent career as a writer, her arrest by the Gestapo and death in Auschwitz — all came to be known with the publication and acclaim of her novel, Suite Française. It was thought that this was the only novel she had completed.

There existed a partial text of Fire in the Blood typed by her husband, but this typescript stopped some forty pages into the novel. What is known is that in 1942, Némirovsky was still working on the novel. The rest of the manuscript was discovered by her biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt in the Némirovsky archive at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine.

Fire in the Blood is a gem of a novel, a minor classic. It is not quite in the same scale as Suite Française, but one can see the same qualities — minute observation, awareness of the many ironies of life and beautiful passages which evoke a vanishing world even in translation.

The world that Némirovsky evokes is that of rural France in the inter-war years. “This region,” she writes, “in the middle of France, is both wild and rich. Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbours, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn’t give a thought to the rest of the world. No châteaux, no visitors.’’ In another place she writes, “The sun was setting. As I walked through the wood, the trees were casting shadows on the ground, and it already felt like night. I moved softly…The water [in the lake] shimmered, giving off a pale light, like a mirror in a dark room.’’

Sherlock Holmes once remarked to his friend, Dr Watson, that the idyllic countryside offered more opportunities for crime than the whole of London. The rural bliss in the middle of France, where Némirovsky’s novel is set, is broken by a death. To most people it is an accident, but as the novel unfolds, it is revealed to be murder. Behind the murder is adultery and jealousy. The cluster of villages where the incident occurs is a secret world that guards its scandals.

Némirovsky probes deeper into the incident and thus into the inner reaches of the narrator’s own past. The ripples of the murder touch the lives of all the central characters of the novel and their lives are laid bare. The writer conveys, in some ineffable way, an undertow of secrecy to everything that happens at the surface of the novel.

Many of the main characters are old people, but the novel is actually about the passion and the abandon of youth. It is a novel about human relationships, their unexpected twists and turns. It is a story about the fragility of happiness.