eShop USA > Books > Fire in the Blood
Fire in the Blood
List Price: $22.00Our Price: $14.96 You Save: $7.04 (32%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9780307267481
ISBN: 0307267482
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: September 25, 2007
Studio: Knopf
Related Items: Featured Listmania!
Editorial Review:
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2007: As the Nazis advanced on France, celebrated writer Irène Némirovsky composed two final masterworks: Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. The first, smuggled out in a suitcase by her escaping daughters when Némirovsky was taken to her death at Auschwitz in 1942, surfaced more than 60 years later and restored her bestselling status. The other, two pages of which slipped out in that same suitcase, was thought lost--until biographers discovered the rest of the manuscript in papers given to Némirovsky's editor for safekeeping. A worthy companion to Suite Française, it follows three interwoven stories across two decades, when the hot-blooded affairs of youth threaten the cool calm of middle age. Once it has all unraveled, the last line lodges in your heart like a sliver. If only there could have been more. --Mari Malcolm
Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irène Némirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Française.Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted in pieces to family and a friend when the author was sent to her death at Auschwitz. The novel—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 tale is Silvio: in his younger years he fled the boredom of the village and made a life of travel and adventure. Now he’s returned, living in a farmer’s hovel in the middle of the woods, and, much to his family’s chagrin, perfectly content with his solitude.But when he attends the wedding of his favorite young cousin—"she has the thing that, when I was young, I used to value most in women: she has fire"—Silvio begins to be drawn back into the complicated life of this small town. 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.Némirovsky wrote with a crystalline understanding of the pretensions and protections of society, and of the varied workings of the human heart, in language as evocative of a vanished era as of the emotional and moral ambiguities in her characters’ lives. All of which was evident in Suite Française—and abundantly evident again in this powerful, passionate novel.A Note on the TextUntil recently, only a partial text of Fire in the Blood was thought to exist, typed up by Irène Némirovsky’s husband, Michel Epstein, to whom she often passed her manuscripts for this purpose. However, Michel's typing breaks off at the words 'I felt so old' (see p. 37), leaving the novel unfinished.Did Michel stop typing when Irène was arrested and deported to Auschwitz on 13 July 1942? Or perhaps even earlier in 1942, when she could no longer find a way to get her novels and short stories published? As readers will learn from the Preface to the French edition of this novel found at the back of the book, it is likely that Némirovsky was still working on Fire in the Blood in 1942. We know this thanks to the work of Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, who were commissioned to write a biography of Némirovsky, and who began extensive research into her archive. Two pages of the original manuscript were found to have been in the suitcase that Némirovsky's daughter, Denise Epstein, carried with her from Issy-l'Évêque when she and her sister, Elisabeth, fled after their mother's arrest, and which contained Némirovsky’s great lost novel Suite Française. And as Philipponnat and Lienhardt trawled the Némirovsky archive at the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), they discovered, amidst papers given by Némirovsky for safe-keeping to her editor and family friend in the spring of 1942, the rest of the missing manuscript: thirty tightly packed pages of handwriting, with very few crossings out, the beginning of which corresponded to Michel’s typed version.It is an extraordinary collection of papers, which adds to our understanding of Némirovsky’s oeuvre. As well as the manuscript of Fire in the Blood, it contains Némirovsky’s working notebooks dating back to 1933, successive versions of several of her novels including David Golder as well as outlines for Captivité, the projected third part of Suite Française.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Universal Topic
What I loved about this book was how the author took her familiar French countryside and populated it with characters who go beyond their locale and somehow represent all of humanity, from whatever race or culture. This book, really, is about the regrets and lost passion that come with ageing. I really enjoyed this book and I have to commend Sandra Smith for an excellent translation.
The reason I didn't give it 5 stars, is that it does have an incomplete feeling about it. Also, the war ... Read More
Rating: - Modest Follow-up to the Panoramic "Suite Francaise" Has Passion But Lacks Historical Context
The astonishing story behind Irène Némirovsky's posthumous 2004 novel, Suite Francaise, about life during WWII France is worthy of a book in itself since it was published 62 years after her death in Auschwitz and only after her aged daughter felt ready to read it before passing it to a French archive. Even though it was designed to be five novellas presented as one consolidated work, Némirovsky was able to complete only two, and yet what remains is an absorbing panoramic masterwork. A book of more ... Read More
Rating: - Fine (if probably unfinished) short novel by Nemirovsky
Irene Nemirovsky's short novel, written before her arrest and subsequent death in Auschwitz in 1942, was considered lost (there was a partial text of the first pages) and was only found on 2007 (!). Nevertheless, everything indicates this is not the final draft, and had she lived to publish it a different version would have arrived to us. The book itself is a tale of secret passions in a French small town. The arrival of Silvio, a single man in his sixties, to his home town, after a lifetime of living ... Read More
Rating:  - Superb writting!
This was a very enjoyable book. Ms. Nemirovsky has a way of grabbing your attention and then you become totally engrossed in the lives of the people she writes about. She has a way of making each person seem very real!
Rating: - fine little novel
If you liked Suite Francaise, you will like this novel. It is not an epic masterpiece like SF, but a beautifully written tale that will not disappoint.
Related Categories:
| |
 |
