Is it ultimately a mystery novel?

Teasing us ever so slowly with hints of dark secrets that do not pop up till half the book is done.

Or is it her language ever so delicate that her allusions to ‘fire’ evoke in us a picture of rural warmth by the logside?
Teasing us again since that is not the author’s intention either.

Unsure of our way in this seamless maze of French Country where the horizons extend way beyond the reach of our eye or heart, we stumble upon revelation upon revelation with a shiver of surprise!

What, this is not about an old man’s efforts to get along till death claims its due?

Oh! So it is about wild women and adulterous liaisons!
No?

Maddeningly complex in her motivation, the author is as simple with her elegant prose, nary a word that will need the services of a dictionary, no sentence structure that falls beyond our grasp, no hyperboles, superlatives or
needless grandeur.

It is the Mill on the Floss of the 21st century, calling out to be read by the fire on a winter evening, what it means to love, what it means to crave excitement, what it means to invite danger, all the while living under the relentless scrutiny of unforgetting neighbours in pastoral lands.

I read it in one go, the way it needs to be read.
It has to be savoured.

I could not help being mesmerized by the two families and their shenanigans that the book talks of.

It devoured me as much as I craved it myself , throwing me off with a flash in the end, elated and spent.

The last time I felt that with any work of fiction was Sandor Marai’s EMBERS.

Written in 1941 and published posthumously with the help of Irene’s biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt only in 2007, this manuscript was thought to be lost in the interim years. A few pages found with her daughter Denise, others mostly found at the IMEC, the novel thus travels through time and geography accruing mystery and tragedy to give us a glimpse of a quiet, peaceful, French countryside that Irene visited in 1938.

Before the war. Issy-l’Eveque. Rural Arcadia.

As the narrator Sylvestre regales:

“Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbours, harvests his wheat, counts his money and does not give a thought to the rest of the world”

“This region has something restrained yet wild about it, something affluent and yet distrustful that is reminiscent of another time, long past”

In the biographers’ words:

“Constructed around a gradually revealed secret, “Fire in the Blood” describes, as a naturalist might describe, a predatory community of extreme cunning. Behind the petty rural scenery, beasts lurk in the shadows, ready to pounce, and as the reader’s eyes become accustomed to the dark, we cannot miss them.”


Published by Knopf, the jacket reads:

Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 but emigrated to France during the Russian Revolution. She attended Sorbonne and wrote a slew of successful novels:

David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, Dogs and Wolves and
The Courilof Affair among others.

She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Times Literary Supplement , Washongton Post Book World etc all wax eloquent with “ Proustian scope”,
“War and Peace of 20th century”, “immediacy found in the Diary of Anne Frank”,
“Tour de force”, “exhilarating”, “uncannily perceptive” …