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Knopf
October 2007
On Sale: September 25, 2007
160 pages
ISBN: 0307267482
EAN: 9780307267481
Hardcover
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Fiction
Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy
of Irène Némirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed
Suite Française. 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 novel—only now
assembled in its entirety—teems with the intertwined lives
of an insular French village in the years before the war,
when “peace” 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 he’s returned, living in a farmer’s hovel
in the middle of the woods, and, much to his family’s
chagrin, perfectly content with his solitude. But when he attends the wedding of his favorite young
cousin—“she has the thing that, when I was young, I used to
value most in women: she has fire”—Silvio 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. Némirovsky 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 characters’ lives. All of which was evident in Suite
Française—and abundantly evident again in this powerful,
passionate novel.
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