Fire in the Blood | 
 enlarge | Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Creator: Sandra Smith
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy New: $4.40
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 53595
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307267482
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9780307267481
ASIN: 0307267482
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: D-5
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Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2007: As the Nazis advanced on France, celebrated writer Irene Nemirovsky composed two final masterworks: Suite Francaise and Fire in the Blood. The first, smuggled out in a suitcase by her escaping daughters when Nemirovsky 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 Nemirovsky's editor for safekeeping. A worthy companion to Suite Francaise, 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
Product Description
Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irene Nemirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Francaise.
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.
Nemirovsky 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 Francaise—and abundantly evident again in this powerful, passionate novel.
A Note on the Text
Until recently, only a partial text of Fire in the Blood was thought to exist, typed up by Irene Nemirovsky’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 Irene 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 Nemirovsky 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 Nemirovsky, and who began extensive research into her archive. Two pages of the original manuscript were found to have been in the suitcase that Nemirovsky's daughter, Denise Epstein, carried with her from Issy-l'Eveque when she and her sister, Elisabeth, fled after their mother's arrest, and which contained Nemirovsky’s great lost novel Suite Francaise. And as Philipponnat and Lienhardt trawled the Nemirovsky archive at the Institut Memoires de l'edition contemporaine (IMEC), they discovered, amidst papers given by Nemirovsky 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 Nemirovsky’s oeuvre. As well as the manuscript of Fire in the Blood, it contains Nemirovsky’s working notebooks dating back to 1933, successive versions of several of her novels including David Golder as well as outlines for Captivite, the projected third part of Suite Francaise.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Modest Follow-up to the Panoramic "Suite Francaise" Has Passion But Lacks Historical Context March 3, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The astonishing story behind Irene Nemirovsky'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, Nemirovsky was able to complete only two, and yet what remains is an absorbing panoramic masterwork. A book of more modest scope, Fire in the Blood, was found among documents that the author left for her publisher before she was deported to the camps.
Even though it was probably unintentional, this 160-page novella feels like an emotional predecessor to the second story in "Suite Francaise", "Dolce", which told of the WWII experiences of several French citizens in a provincial village where a German regiment has just arrived. Nemirovsky sets most of her story in "Fire in the Blood" sometime between the world wars in the same village, Issy-l'Eveque. Unlike the other book, she doesn't provide much real-life context to ground the story against a historical background. What she seems to be reaching for is a timeless story of forgiveness centered on the revelation of a youthful love affair and its consequences. Due to her prodigious literary talent, Nemirovsky succeeds in many ways but not entirely.
The plot focuses on Silvio, who has spent his youth traveling the world before returning to Issy-l'Eveque and living in seclusion as a farmer. Now in his fifties, he attends the wedding of his cousin Colette, a young woman with "fire in her blood", to a local miller. Begging her parents to share their love story, Colette yearns for a long happy marriage like theirs. A few years later, her husband dies under mysterious circumstances, and Silvio uncovers a web of deceit with life-altering ramifications. This is all handled by Nemirovsky with intelligence and her particular powers of observation on full display, but by the end of the book, the story feels frustratingly unfinished. The power of "Suite Francaise" comes from the author's unerring ability to humanize real-life events during WWII, but no such connection is evident here. Much of the lapse is forgivable given her personal circumstances. There is no telling how this book would have evolved if she had an opportunity to do rewrites, but what remains still makes for worthwhile reading.
Fine (if probably unfinished) short novel by Nemirovsky January 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 abroad, lets secrets hidden under the cover of normalcy and boredom out of the closet; a lot of it it's beguiling, but it also feels incomplete: for example, the relationship between Silvio and Brigitte (fundamental, given what we find in the book's last pages) is curiously underworked: this lets me to think we should consider this book to be an unfinished work. Despite this, it is another fine work by the Russian-born Jewish-raised French author, whose books have gone through a revival in the last few years.
 Superb writting! January 7, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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!
fine little novel December 29, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 not as good as suite francais December 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I looked forward to this book since i had really liked " Suite Francais", but found "Fire" to be a little juvenile and not terribly interesting .. very french, interesting about the habits of people in small towns. alittle hard to believe and not as well written as the other book.
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