The most impressive piece of fiction published in Britain in 2006 was written in France in 1942. When it appeared in English translation last year, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was received with both acclaim and astonishment. Acclaim, because it was a masterpiece. Astonishment, because of the remarkable way its manuscript had survived: snatched up by her daughters when they fled the family home to escape being sent to their deaths in Auschwitz as their parents had been; kept in hiding with them throughout the war; stored unread for decades; looked at only in 1996 when it was about to be handed over to a war archive.

Miraculously, it now turns out that another unpublished work by Némirovsky – Fire in the Blood – was also saved. A literary find of the same quality as Suite Française, it fascinatingly complements it. Where Suite Française’s two completed sections (Storm in June and Dolce) contrastingly chronicled the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940 and the occupation of a village deep in the French countryside by German soldiers, Fire in the Blood focuses on prewar life in the same dour rural community.

As in Suite Française, Némirovsky’s intense responsiveness to the country that became her adopted home in 1919, after the Russian revolution drove her and her parents from St Petersburg, is perceptible on every page. So is her fruitful absorption in French literature. Her novella’s clear-eyed sexual realism and the mixture of down-to-earth practicality and sensuous evocation it brings to its portrayals of the countryside call to mind Colette (a native of the Burgundy region where it is set). Its acquisitive, distrustful landowners sunk in taciturn routines, beneath which desperations and long-held animosities seethe, wouldn’t be out of place amid the claustrophobic provincial households of François Mauriac’s novels.

Deceptively quiet and simple-seeming at first, Fire in the Blood takes you into a vividly realised rural world. Green vines quiver in the breeze. Ripe fruit drops gently into the grass. An autumn sunset flames above sodden, tilled fields. Crows circle round snow-laden trees in the bleak winters when life withdraws into the lonely farmhouses. These seasonal and agricultural rhythms provide the backdrop to a story of what transpires when human mating and fertility go awry.

Expert View

This new find will help to consolidate Nemirovsky resurrected reputation, and deepen understanding of a generous, yet steely, literary sensibility

Ruth Scurr, of The Times

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Fire in her blood

Suite Française was a posthumous literary sensation for Irene Nemirovsky. Now there’s more from the same suitcase

• Extract of Fire in the Blood

BACKGROUND

• Fire in the Blood

• Suite Francaise

Sylvestre, the ageing bachelor who narrates the tale, was born into the district but has spent many years away – travelling abroad – before returning to settle down in the draughty old house that is all that remains of the inheritance he has squandered. As someone who knows the community intimately but has been sufficiently removed to view it with an outsider’s eye, he seems an ideally placed commentator on the events that occur. Gradually it becomes apparent that he is also guiltily implicated in them.

The story opens just before the wedding of his cousin’s lively daughter. By the time it ends a couple of years later, a tangle of hidden secrets has been brought to light and seen to have taken a terrible toll. A killing, two loveless marriages of nubile girls to shrivelled elderly men, covert illegitimacy, furtive hatreds, grudges, jealousies, betrayals and cruel pretences mesh together as history distortedly repeats itself and nemesis unrolls.

Time is as important an element as place in this haunting novella. The gulf between the younger and the older generations and between people’s past and present selves is constantly spotlit. Aflame with “the fire in the blood”, the young can’t comprehend their dulled-down elders, and vice versa. Passion and dispassion stare at each other with mutual lack of understanding. In a book fuelled with images of fire and embers, Némirovsky brilliantly depicts a closed-in, inward-looking community, then gives what happens in it universal resonance by exhibiting not only what people do to each other but what the passing of time does to us all.

Buy FIRE IN THE BLOOD by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith
Chatto £12.99 pp153

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