Fire in the Blood | 
 enlarge | Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 1299284
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0676979815
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780676979817
ASIN: 0676979815
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
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
A new treasure unearthed by Nemirovsky’s biographers: another never-before-published novel from the author of the #1 bestselling Suite Francaise.
This perfect gem of a novel was discovered only recently in separate archive files. A few pages were in the famous suitcase that Irene Nemirovsky’s daughters saved, but the balance had been deposited with a very close friend during the war. A morality tale with doubtful morals, a story of murder, love and betrayal in rural France, Fire in the Blood, planned in 1937 and written in 1941, is set in a small village (based on Issy l’Eveque, where Suite Francaise was written), and brilliantly prefigures the village community in her later masterpiece.
Fire in the Blood is a beautiful chamber piece which starts quietly, lyrically, but then races away with revelations and narrative twists in a story about young women forced into marriages with old men, about mothers and daughters, stepmothers and stepdaughters, youthful passions and the regrets of old age, about peasant communities and the ways they hide their secrets. Nemirovsky looks at her characters, both young and old, with the same clear-eyed distance and humanity as she displayed in Suite Francaise, unpeeling layer after layer. As atmospheric and haunting as Sandor Marai’s Embers, and with the crystalline perfection of Chekhov, Fire in the Blood is another gripping literary find.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
a lovely, wicked story September 28, 2008
"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 September 15, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
maybe it's me but i did not enjoy this book. I didn't like Suite franchise either.
A Proustian Jewel September 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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!
"Youthful ardor and regrets" September 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Irene Nemirovsky'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 Francaise," 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'Eveque 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 Helene and her family visit him, eager to share the news of Helene'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.
Nemirovsky perished in Auschwitz in 1942, leaving behind her unfinished "Suite Francaise" 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 passionne 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 August 31, 2008
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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