Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky
Posted in Iain (M) Banks, Irène Némirovsky, Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 11 December 2013
Chatto & Windus 2007, 153 + xvi p. First published by Editions Denoël, 2007. Translated from the French Chaleur du Sang by Sandra Smith

Most of the handwritten manuscript for Fire in the Blood had been thought lost (45 pages of typescript had been completed) but turned up, along with her later novel Suite Francaise, in the Némirovsky archive given by her daughters to her friend (and editor) for safe keeping in 1942.
It is a worthy resurrection. Despite being barely longer than a novella there is enough insight into humanity and affairs of the heart, not to mention deceit and betrayal, in its 153 pages to grace many a longer novel.
Set in rural France in an area where people know all about each other’s lives and supposed secrets but don’t talk about them, unless while drunk or there is an advantage to be gained. Within families, “In order to avoid scandal, to make sure no one knows anything, all hatreds are hidden. What they fear most of all is that others might know their business.”
The narrator is Sylvestre, who travelled and returned – “A prodigal son. By the time I got back… even the fatted calf had waited so long it had died of old age” – who now lives alone. The fires of youth, “That love, those dreams…. are strangers.” That burning, “devours everything and then, in a few years, a few months, a few hours even, it burns itself out. Then you see how much damage has been done.”
The story concerns the pitfalls of young women marrying older men for security, of marital infidelities and of secrets maintained for years. The themes are of feelings beyond love, fire in the blood, that compels people to commit acts they might regret, and of forgetting forbidden loves as something necessary, plus the inability to forgive someone else’s happiness.
There are frequent bons mots:-
“Countrywomen are never ones to miss a free show, the kind you get with a birth or sudden death.”
“Who knows the real woman? The lover or the husband?”
“There’s no such thing as uncomplicated emotions.”
“You call out for (love.) The wave crashes into your heart, so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy.”
“The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that’s insatiable …. that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire.”
For insights into the affairs of the heart, the recklessness of youth, the loneliness of old age, look no further. This is the best book, with the possible exception of an Iain Banks, I have read this year.
Tags: Iain Banks, Irène Némirovsky, Irene Nemirowsky, Suite Francaise