I WILL NEVER FORGET first reading Suite Française: when the magnificent text breaks after 344 pages – only halfway through Irène Némirovsky’s portrait of life in France under Nazi occupation – it is so shocking that you can all but hear the knock of French police at the door.

They took her first to a concentration camp at Pithiviers, then to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942, aged 39. The incomplete manuscript of Suite Françaisewas hidden in a suitcase and preserved by Némirovsky’s small daughters, hidden themselves by brave villagers in Issy-l’Evêque, where the novelist had lived since the German invasion of 1940.

When it was finally published (in French in 2004, and in English in 2006), the lucid beauty of Némirovsky’s prose proved even more compelling than the harrowing story of her novel’s provenance, and Suite Française shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists.

Fire in the Blood deserves the same success. This short novel existed only as a typed fragment until two pages of the original manuscript were discovered in the suitcase with Suite Française. Némirovsky’s biographers found the missing manuscript in an archive of papers that she gave her editor for safe-keeping in spring 1942. She was too clever, too observant, not to see what might happen to Jews in occupied France, but could not have known how fast: “Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait,” she wrote in her notebooks.

Expert View

Deceptively quiet and simple-seeming at first, Fire in the Blood takes you into a vividly realised rural world

Peter Kemp, of The Sunday 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

• The road from war

• The road to Auschwitz

Fire in the Blood, like the second and the projected third part of Suite Française, is set in Issy-l’Evêque: “This region, in the middle of France, is both wild and rich. Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbours, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn’t give a thought to the rest of the world. No châteaux, no visitors.”

The narrator is an old man, Silvio, reminiscing coldly about “a beautiful woman who was once in love with me”, raking cynically the ashes of past passion.

“Picture the coldest, most austere sitting room in the whole province. Above the fireplace there were two bronze candelabra depicting the flames of love. I can picture them to this day . . . horrible.” Némirovsky has wicked fun with Silvio, whose diatribe on youth, love and sexual passion is mined with a sense of his own decrepitude.

Silvio also lampoons parochial life and manners. He sneers at rural wedding receptions: “The Bombe Glâcée for dessert and the groom in pain because his shoes are too tight, and, from every nook and cranny of the surrounding countryside, the family, friends and neighbours – people sometimes not seen in years, but who suddenly turn up, like corks bobbing to the surface, each one awakening the memory of quarrels that started back in the mists of time, past loves, former grudges, engagements broken then forgotten, inheritances and law suits . . .”

Here, as in Suite Française, the human pettiness and incidental cruelty that Némirovsky understands so soberly is offset by her sensual delight in the natural world: “In nature, there is a moment of perfection when every hope is realised, when the luscious fruits finally fall, a crowning moment towards the end of summer. But it quickly passes and the autumn rains begin. It’s the same for people.”

As a novelist of landscape, Némirovsky needs to be understood in the tradition of Russia, where she was born before her family fled the revolution in 1918. Fire in the Blood offers fine examples of word-painting: “Night descends . . . but you can’t really call it night: the azure blue of the day grows misty, turns almost green and colour slowly melts away, leaving a delicate hue that is midway between translucent pearl and steel grey.”

As the narrative gathers pace, unearthing one buried secret after another, like a disgruntled child kicking through fallen leaves, Issy-l’Evêque comes clearly into view. The café, the mill, the bridge, the river: a beautiful place darkened by human purposes.

Némirovsky reread Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur( Within a Budding Grove) as she worked on Fire in the Blood.She found her subject echoed in Proust’s “marvellous words”: “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us.” Her own reflection on the journey from youth to old age maps the birth and death of impetuous passion to the absence of fire in the blood. In the end, there is bitterness, but also calm.

Némirovsky’s is one of the most distinctive and assured female voices in European literature. This new find will help to consolidate her resurrected reputation, and deepen understanding of a generous, yet steely, literary sensibility.

Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky translated by Sandra Smith
Chatto & Windus, £12.99; 144pp

Ruth Scurr appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday October 13 at 5pm
Call 01242 227979
www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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