Admittedly a late-adopter of Suite Francaise (silly issues with the cover eventually overcome) I like to think I have more than made up for that early struggle with the writing of Irene Nemirovksy by reading almost everything now available in translation and writing about it here... Suite Francaise, Le Bal, The Couriloff Affair, Jezebel, The Misunderstanding,and David Golder . So when I saw news of another book in the offing, The Fires of Autumn, I downloaded an advance digital copy from NetGalley and devoured the book over a weekend in August. Written in the last two years of Irene Nemirovsky's life, after fleeing Paris in 1940, the book was first published in 1957 and again this week in yet another superlative translation from Sandra Smith.
Parisian life from the eve of World War One through to World War Two and considered by many to be a prequel to Suite Francaise, The Fires of Autumn opens in 1912 and the first chapters are quickly and effectively populated with families Brun and Jacquelan and their respective friends. Home is a working class area near the Gare de Lyon and life goes on to the background noise of the trains. People and scene-setting are such huge strengths of Irene Nemirovsky's writing that the scene comes to life in the imagination rapidly and with ease, and it wasn't long before I was promenading along the Champs Elysees with these happy, contented and satisfied people. Paris has the air of Paradise, of unmatched perfection, the sky a sugary, pale mauve, a confection good enough to eat...I thought of sugared almonds, and really what could possibly go wrong with this idyll.
Futures and careers are being planned, proposals of marriage being considered, but as the threat of war looms in 1914 so the attitudes of these people I am coming to know shifts; scorn , denial, resignation and patriotism will intervene. Whilst it is impossible to read without hindsight, because we know all too well what is coming, Irene Nemirovsky makes it entirely possible to read in the historical moment and feel as her characters do.
Some will die at the Front, others will be injured in battle whilst the young and impressionable like Bernard Jacquelain, exposed to the violence and savagery of war, will be changed for ever...
'He had aged without having had time to grow up; he was like a piece of fruit picked too early : bite into it and all you will taste is hard bitter flesh.'
and Irene Nemirovksy begins to explore with clarity and precision the real impact of this industrial-scale war on a mind too young and unformed...
'Mentally he had been wounded in a way that nothing in future could ever heal, a wound that would grow deeper every day of his life. It was a kind of weariness, a chink in his armour, a lack of faith, pure exhaustion and a fierce hunger for life, 'And I'll live for me, and me alone.'
Everything becomes strange and distorted, people, place and nation irrevocably changed. The mentality of war transposed into peace time will create a generation of crooks, a mass of men who have not been prepared for the transition, and slowly conversations reveal the fears and hopes of this post-war world. With such clarity of purpose is the reader made aware of the fearless reckless society that emerges in the 1920s and I suddenly understood a great deal more about that time than I had before. We have been warned too, it is likely there will be little consolation to come.
In many ways this is the unlucky generation explained, the generation that knew two wars, and Irene Nemirovsky skillfully exposes the fickleness, the uncertainties, the infidelities and sharp business practices that contribute to the sheer madness of the times....
'...these are the fires of autumn; they purify the land; they prepare it for new growth. You are still young. These great fires have not yet burned in your life. But they will. They will destroy many things...'
As the story moves into the Second World War, and remembering this book was written in the midst of it, there is a moment of imprisonment for one of the characters that stopped me in my tracks.
The description so astute, so prescient, how did Irene Nemirovsky know so clearly how it felt..
What must her own imprisonment have felt like...
Might she have recalled what she wrote in The Fires of Autumn...
'They were living a nightmare that would end, suddenly, in a flash, just as it had begun. Someone would unlock the doors; the barbed wire fences would be taken down. They would be told : 'You are free.'
Oh how I pray that Irene Nemirovksy gained some sense of hope and comfort from her own optimistic words in those last days in Auschwitz.
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