Irène Némirovsky Books In Order

David Golder

In 1929, 26 year old Ir ne N mirovsky shot to fame in France with the publication of her first novel David Golder. At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Fran aise and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul. Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joy, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder’s security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to decide which to pursue: revenge or altruism?Available for the first time since 1930, David Golder is a page turningly chilling and brilliant portrait of the frenzied capitalism of the 1920s and a universal parable about the mirage of wealth.

Le Bal

From the acclaimed author of Suite Fran aise comes N mirovsky’s third novel, a masterpiece of French literature, available for the first time in Canada. Le Bal is a penetrating and incisive book set in early twentieth century France. At its heart is the tension between mother and daughter. The nouveau riche Kampfs, desperate to become members of the social elite, decide to throw a ball to launch themselves into high society. For selfish reasons Mrs. Kampf forbids her teenage daughter, Antoinette, to attend the ball and banishes her to the laundry room. In an unpremeditated fury of revolt and despair, Antoinette takes a swift and horrible revenge. A cruel, funny and tender examination of class differences, Le Bal describes the torments of childhood with rare accuracy. Also included in this volume is Snow in Autumn, in which N mirovsky pays homage to Chekov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris.

The Courilof Affair

In 1903 L on M a devout terrorist is given the responsibility by the Revolutionary Committee of publicly liquidating Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, a notoriously brutal and cold blooded minister. Posing as his newly appointed personal physician, L on M is made privy to the inner world of Courilof his failing health, his troubled domestic situation and, most importantly, the tyrannical grip that the Czar himself holds over all his ministers, forcing them to obey him or suffer the most deadly punishments. Set in Kiev and St. Petersburg, The Courilof Affair, the story of one man’s inquisition during the Bolshevik Revolution, is both an elegy to a world lost and an unsparing observation of human motives and behaviour during a period of radical upheaval in European history.

Jezebel

A dramatic tale of murder and passion in 1930s France from the author of David Golder and Suite Fran aise. In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she is still beautiful, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting dead her much younger lover. As the witnesses take the stand and the case unfolds, Gladys relives fragments of her past: her childhood, her absent father, her marriage, her turbulent relationship with her daughter, her decline, and then the final irrevocable act. With the depth of insight and pitiless compassion we have come to expect from the author of Suite Fran aise, Ir ne N mirovsky shows us the soul of a desperate woman obsessed with her lost youth.

All Our Worldly Goods

All Our Worldly Goods reads like a prequel to Suite Fran aise, but is a perfect novel in its own right. In haunting ways, this compelling novel prefigures Suite Fran aise and some of the themes of N mirovsky’s great unfinished sequence of novels. All Our Worldly Goods, though, is complete, and exquisitely so a perfect novel in its own right. First published in France in 1947, after the author s death, it is a gripping story of family life and star crossed lovers, set in France between 1910 and 1940. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. This is Balzac or The Forsyte Saga on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close up, with N mirovsky s characteristically sly humour and clear eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, and telling observations of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, N mirovsky is at the height of her powers. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points out with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close those two wars were, how history repeated itself, tragically and shockingly. The story opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach and ends with a changed world under Na*zi occupation.

Suite Francaise

Suite Fran aise is both a brilliant novel of wartime and an extraordinary historical document. An unmatched evocation of the exodus from Paris after the German invasion of 1940, and of life under the Na*zi occupation, it was written by the esteemed French novelist Ir ne N mirovsky as events unfolded around her. This haunting masterpiece has been hailed by European critics as a War and Peace for the Second World War.

Though she conceived the book as a five part work based on the form of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Ir ne N mirovsky was able to write only the first two parts, Storm in June and Dolce, before she was arrested in July 1942. She died in Auschwitz the following month. The manuscript was saved by her young daughter Denise; it was only decades later that Denise learned that what she had imagined was her mother s journal was in fact an invaluable work of art.

Storm in June takes place in the tumult of the evacuation from Paris in 1940, just before the arrival of the invading German army. It moves vividly between different levels of society from the wealthy P ricand family, whose servants pack up their possessions for them, to a group of orphans from the 16th arrondisseme*nt escaping in a military truck. N mirovsky s immense canvas includes deserting soldiers and terrified secretaries, cynical bank directors and hapless priests, egotistical writers and hardscrabble prostitutes all thrown together in a chaotic attempt to escape the capital. Moving between them chapter by chapter, this thrilling novel describes a journey hampered and in some cases abandoned because of confusion, shelling, rumour, lack of supplies, bad luck and ordinary human weakness. Cars break down or are stolen; relatives are forgotten; friends are divided; but there are also moments of love and charity. Throughout, whether depicting saintly forbearance or the basest selfishness, Storm in June neither sweetens nor demonizes its characters; unsentimentally, with stunning perceptiveness, N mirovsky shows the complexities that mean no one is simply a hero or villain.

The second volume, Dolce, is set in the German occupied village of Bussy. Again, N mirovsky switches seamlessly between social strata, from tenant farmers to the local aristocracy. The focus, however, is on the delicate, secret love affair between a German soldier and the French woman in whose house he has been billeted; the passion, doubts and deceits of their burgeoning relationship echo the complex mixture of hostility and acceptance felt by the occupied community as a whole. N mirovsky is amazingly sensitive in her depiction of changing, often contradictory emotions, but her attention to the personal is matched by her sharp eyed discussion of small town life and the politics of occupation. In this myth dissolving book, the French villagers see the Germans as oppressive warriors, but also as handsome young men, and occupation does nothing to remedy the condescension and envy that bedevil relations between rich and poor.

Quite apart from the astonishing story of its survival, Suite Fran aise is a novel of genius and lasting artistic value. Subtle, often fiercely ironic, and deeply compassionate, it is both a piercing record of its time and a humane, profoundly moving novel.

Fire in the Blood

Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Ir ne N mirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Fran aise.

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.

N mirovsky 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 Fran aise 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 Ir ne N mirovsky 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 Ir ne 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 N mirovsky 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 N mirovsky, and who began extensive research into her archive. Two pages of the original manuscript were found to have been in the suitcase that N mirovsky’s daughter, Denise Epstein, carried with her from Issy l’ v que when she and her sister, Elisabeth, fled after their mother’s arrest, and which contained N mirovsky s great lost novel Suite Fran aise. And as Philipponnat and Lienhardt trawled the N mirovsky archive at the Institut M moires de l’ dition contemporaine IMEC, they discovered, amidst papers given by N mirovsky 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 N mirovsky s oeuvre. As well as the manuscript of Fire in the Blood, it contains N mirovsky s working notebooks dating back to 1933, successive versions of several of her novels including David Golder as well as outlines for Captivit , the projected third part of Suite Fran aise.

The Dogs and the Wolves

This panoramic novel and achingly poignant love story sweeps the reader from the Jewish quarter of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the last century to Paris in the twenties and thirties. At the heart of the story, which harks back to Ir ne N mirovsky’s roots, is a tragic love between Ada Sinner from the poor Jewish quarter and Harry Sinner, son of a rich financier. The Dogs and the Wolves are the comfortable assimilated rich Jews up on the hill, and their distant cousins down below in the ghetto. Ada moves to Paris with her aunt s family, all of them looking for a brighter future. Ada makes a living in Paris as an artist, painting scenes from the world she has left behind. She shares memories of childhood with her cousin Ben, who has loved her for years and wants her to marry him. But Harry Sinner is also in Paris, and soon Ada is torn between two men and an uncertain future as recessions and revolutions shake society and the world moves towards another war. The Dogs and the Wolves is painted on a broad, vibrant canvas, with N mirovsky s forensic eye for small cruelties and everyday cowardice. It is an achingly poignant novel about blood and belonging, dreams and desire.

Four Novels

Book Jacket Status: JacketedReaders everywhere were introduced to the work of Ir ne N mirovsky through the publication of her long lost masterpiece, Suite Fran aise. But Suite Fran aise was only the coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, magnificent novelist. Here in one volume are four of N mirovsky’s other novels all of them newly translated by the award winning Sandra Smith, and all, except DAVID GOLDER, available in English for the first time. DAVID GOLDER is the novel that established N irovsky s reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty six. It is a novel about greed and lonliness, the story of a self made business man, once wealthy, now suffering a breakdown as he nears the lonely end of his life. THE COURILOF AFFAIR tells the story of a Russian revolutionary living out his last days and his recollections of his first infamous assassination. Also included are two short, gemlike novels: THE BALL, a pointed exploration of adolescence and the obsession with status among the bourgeoisie; and SNOW IN AUTUMN, an evocative tale of White Russian migr s in Paris after the Russian Revolution. Introduced by celebrated novelist Claire Messud, this collection of four spellbinding novels offers the same storytelling mastery, powerful clarity of language, and empathic grasp of human behavior that would give shape to Suite Fran aise.

Dimanche and Other Stories

A never before translated collection by the bestselling author of Suite Fran aiseWritten between 1934 and 1942, these ten gem like stories mine the same terrain of N mirovsky’s bestselling novel Suite Fran aise: a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives; the manners and mannerisms of the French bourgeoisie; questions of religion and personal identity. Moving from the drawing rooms of pre war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France, here we find the beautiful work of a writer at the height of her tragically short career.