Purchase
Knopf
October 2007
On Sale: September 25, 2007
160 pages
ISBN: 0307267482
EAN: 9780307267481
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Fiction
Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of IrΓ¨ne NΓ©mirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite FranΓ§aise. Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted in pieces to family and a friend when the author was sent to her death at Auschwitz. The novelβonly now assembled in its entiretyβteems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when βpeaceβ was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness. At the center of the tale is Silvio: in his younger years he fled the boredom of the village and made a life of travel and adventure. Now heβs returned, living in a farmerβs hovel in the middle of the woods, and, much to his familyβs chagrin, perfectly content with his solitude. But when he attends the wedding of his favorite young cousinββshe has the thing that, when I was young, I used to value most in women: she has fireββSilvio begins to be drawn back into the complicated life of this small town. As his narration unfolds, we are given an intimate picture of the loves and infidelities, the scandals, the youthful ardor and regrets of age that tie Silvio to the long-guarded secrets of the past. NΓ©mirovsky wrote with a crystalline understanding of the pretensions and protections of society, and of the varied workings of the human heart, in language as evocative of a vanished era as of the emotional and moral ambiguities in her charactersβ lives. All of which was evident in Suite FranΓ§aiseβand abundantly evident again in this powerful, passionate novel.
 Media BuzzWeekend Edition Saturday - September 22, 2007
| 
© 2003-2026