Selected Product:
| Fire in the Blood (Vintage International)
Paperback
Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2008-07-15
ISBN-10: 030738800X
ISBN-13: 9780307388001
List Price: $12.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a newly discovered novel, a story of passion and long-kept secrets, set against the background of a rural French village in the years before World War II.
Written in 1941, Fire in the Blood – only now assembled in its entirety – teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when "peace" was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness. At the center of the novel is Silvio, who has returned to this small town after years away. As his narration unfolds, we are given an intimate picture of the loves and infidelities, the scandals, the youthful ardor and regrets of age that tie Silvio to the long-guarded secrets of the past.
a lovely, wicked story
| Customer Rating: | "Fire in the Blood" is a wonderful story of a small French community before World War II and the social struggles which they encounter. Overrun by minding their own business, the citizens of the backwater hamlet allow terrible moral digressions to go unpunished and genuine love to be overshadowed by prior commitments and counterintuitive traditions.
The book is also incredibly easy to read, and can be completed in a sitting or two for the quick reader. The translation is beautiful yet simple - a quality so rarely found in translated foreign literature. |
If there was nothing else to read
| Customer Rating: | | maybe it's me but i did not enjoy this book. I didn't like Suite franchise either. |
A Proustian Jewel
| Customer Rating: | This is indeed a Proustian gem. As the Preface to the French Edition notes, "The book grew in her mind when, during the summer of 1938, she (Nemirovsky) reread Proust's Within a Budding Grove." What this elegantly written, luxuriant and, sadly, incomplete narrative concerns is the perennial search for a self which must always remain fictional due to the passage of time. As Nemirovsky, with a flair, puts it herein, "If they could see their own youth resurrected before them, it would horrify them, or else they wouldn't recognize it; they would stare at it and say, `That love, those dreams, that fire are strangers to us.' Their own youth.... So how can they possibly expect to understand anyone else's?" (The ellipsis is Nemirovsky's)
I would delightedly give this glowing, truncated narrative five stars if it weren't for the fragmentation inherent in an uncompleted work. So, four stars and a recommendation to all Proustians hiding out in Amazonia: You will love and dwell on this short work!
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"Youthful ardor and regrets"
| Customer Rating: | Irène Némirovsky's "Fire in the Blood (Chaleur du sang)" is a novella about the intensity of youth and the affairs of the heart. It is pensive, melancholy, almost heartbreaking. Quite unlike her more well-known "Suite Française," it is about survival of a different sort. This time, it's surviving the pain of losing someone who's so fervently loved.
After years spent wandering the world, Silvio returns to his French roots, the rural village of Issy-l'Évêque in Burgundy. Decades go by and now an old man and having been forced to sell the land he's inherited, Silvio's days are spent in shabby existence--he falls asleep beside the fire, smokes his pipe and strokes his dog, seemingly pleased with the peace of his lonely country life--as "the days drag on while the years fly by."
His cousin Hélène and her family visit him, eager to share the news of Hélène's daughter's impending marriage. As the story progresses, we learn that Colette, the daughter, has been hiding a sordid secret and it involves a young married woman, Brigitte, and a handsome womanizer named Marc. As more revelations surface and a scandal becomes imminent, Silvio reluctantly revisits his memories of 1912, when as a young soldier, he fell madly in love with the woman of his dreams and unknowingly set into motion the tragedy of the present.
Némirovsky perished in Auschwitz in 1942, leaving behind her unfinished "Suite Française" and two pages of "Fire in the Blood." More pages of Fire were later discovered and mindful that she may not have been able to finish this as well, I shan't be too critical. It is decidedly elegiac, evidenced by Silvio's painful lament of a long-gone youth and the fire in him that has burned out. The secrets that emerge are indeed tragic, and given the time and mores, are quite believable. However, it has the feel of an unfinished novel and melodrama dominates throughout. Her descriptions of la vie rurale are authentic (the insularity, the suspicious attitudes toward outsiders, etc.), but the amour passionné is uncharacteristically histrionic. As to whether she would have edited it had she lived or the translation was too literal is anybody's guess.
Though not altogether as stirring as Suite, Fire is nonetheless an interesting and touching story. For some it may even be a reminder of an enduring passion, though I hope one of gladness rather than grief. |
Extraordinary insight
| Customer Rating: | | This tiny volume is the other part- manuscript saved by the daughters of brilliant, Jewish-Russian author, Irene Nemirovsky who wrote Suite Francaise before being interned and murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in WW2. She was only a young woman in her thirties when she wrote this incredibly insightful story of old and new love among the farming classes in France in the twenties and thirties ( and what a miserable, vindictive lot they appear to be) The story is of a woung widow who married a bitter, mean farmer who was 40 years her senior but to whom she devoted all of her time until she was unable to resist the urging of the blood and became an young man's mistress. In typical fashion we learn that this young man immediately lost interest in her, and moved on. It's an old story but what I find extraordinary is that Nemirovsky was able, at a young age, to envisage some twenty years ahead when her equilibrium was restored, and how life would play out the story. I've lived enough of this story to be able now, as a much older woman, to assure readers that she was absolutely correct, but how she could predict such a future is amazing. The world lost a genius writer when Irene Nemirovsky died. |
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