Irene Nemirovsky's spare but luminous novella, Fire in the Blood, is set in an out-of-the-way French village a few years before the start of World War II. Just as the plot is beginning to come to a boil, the author interjects an easy-to-overlook but very telling incident. "A car full of Parisians arrived and stopped in front of the Hotel des Voyaguers. 'It's so quiet,' one woman said." The automobile and its condescending passengers soon drive on and Nemirovsky, speaking through her narrator, offers her readership a few words of guidance: "How many peaceful sleepy places they'll drive through tonight, how many sleepy villages.... They'll pass silent sombre country estates and will not begin to imagine the dark secret life within -- a life they will never come to know."
In Fire in the Blood, Nemirovky's subject is Issy-l'Eveque and its "dark secret life." As it turns out, there is as much mystery and passion in this corner of rural Burgundy as in Paris or any other modern metropolis. In fact, the yearnings and loves and jealousies and inhibitions of these patronized village folk soon achieve nothing less than tragic proportion.
Fire in the Blood resists easy classification. It's a satire, a novel of manners, a mystery, and also a romance. Nemirovsky manages to depict an entire society in little -- not only its ingrained customs, but the resistance to those customs.
Not to spoil the story, but here's the situation: unmarried old Uncle Sylvio, after many years abroad, has returned home to the village of his birth. His upstanding young niece Colette marries a local miller named Jean Dorin. A couple of years later, Jean Dorin falls into the river and drowns. Uncle Silvio happens to know that his niece has been carrying on an affair and he also knows that her young lover has been visiting not just Colette but also Brigitte Declos, an attractive woman married to an elderly farmer. From this beginning, the story takes a series of winding and unanticipated turns. But Nemirovsky is not content merely to complicate the plot. Her quarry is larger: it's the moral and psychological ramifications of Issy-l'Eveque's mysteries. Indeed, the story, the plot ends thirty pages before the novel comes to a close, and revelations that at first seem like a coda became a climax. It's a little miracle that Nemirovsky has created a story that manages to be both a wicked satire of rural complacency and an exhortation to a more full life.
I've now read Fire in the Blood twice, the second time with great care. The novella was more intricate, more carefully plotted the second time than I had noticed or appreciated. Unless I'm deceiving myself, this is one heck of a piece of writing. I'm dazzled.
Irene Nemirovsky was thirty-nine years old when she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. She wrote Fire in the Blood in 1940. Thought to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in an old valise and the novella published for the first time in 2007.
How many more stories might Nemirovksy have told? How much more life might she have lived?
Comments