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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

It seems that Némirovsky was not satisfied with the first version, started in 1938, and that she rewrote Fire in the Blood after the outbreak of war, when she had left Paris permanently and returned to Issy-l’Evêque, this time as a refugee hoping to escape from the French government’s anti-Jewish persecution. In the rewritten version, the story is punctuated with successive deaths, with death seen as a routine event, just another way of marking the passing years, life terminated and renewed, each generation shadowing the life of its predecessor. The drama of this repeated pattern is revealed when we learn on almost the last page of the book that the crisis in the lives of the parents, when they were young, occurred in the spring of 1914. Now it is the turn of the children and it is of course 1939. In the year when the young bride, Colette, gives birth the summer is cold and short. ‘Once again, darkness falls at three o’clock, the crows circle the skies, there’s snow on the roads and, in each isolated house, life closes in on itself even more.’ The breaking, winter storm will affect millions, not just the three or four principal characters of the second generation, anymore than it did those of the first. Arcadia will once again be shattered. With this atmosphere of foreboding Némirovsky repeats, or rather prefigures, the mood of Suite Française, when she gave an uncanny impression of an author who was about to vanish into her own pages, where her real life would be consumed by the monsters of her own imagination.

Following the new translations of Suite Française, David Golder and Le Bal, English readers now have the chance to enjoy a wide range of Némirovsky’s work. Is it too much to hope that there may have been a third notebook inside that briefcase?

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