Wednesday 9 July 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Liz Anderson

Liz suggests


Fire in the Blood

A gathering of ghosts

Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith
Chatto, 153pp, £12.99,
Patrick Marnham
Tuesday, 11th December 2007

Patrick Marnham

Fire in the Blood is the second recently discovered and hitherto unpublished novel by the author of Suite Française, the two-volume work that was written shortly before French police arrested Irène Némirovsky in July 1942 and deported her to Auschwitz.

The story of the discovery of Suite Française, the child running from the gendarmes who had just arrested her mother and grabbing a briefcase that contained the manuscript of a posthumous masterpiece, has become one of the great biographical anecdotes of the French Occupation. But the same small briefcase also contained another fragment, this time an un-titled typescript that led researchers in the Némirovsky archive to the complete version of Fire in the Blood. Unlike Suite Française, this was started before the war broke out, when the Russian émigré author was at the height of her career as a best-selling novelist and was still hoping that her application for French nationality would be approved.

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