Fire in the Blood is delicate but fiery as the Beaujolais that they produce in Central France. This is the pre World War II account of Silvio’s internal fire that got consumed and died, his love of life and of Helene that lost its fervor and passion. The fire in the blood lights up in one’s youth and then eats up everything in its path, razes a forest and leaves a tinder-ember debris trail of secrets and concealments. Irene Nemirovsky unveils these secrets layer by layer, as seen from Silvio’s point of view, annotating a journal’s worth of memories and disclosures, enough to drown oneself in regret, nostalgia and loneliness.
Set among the rural “paysan” in a rustic town Issy-l’Evêque, where the landed farm owners minded their own business and did not care much about others around them, Nemirovsky paints the fires that the youth get themselves involved with but cannot extricate themselves out of. Families were identified with their land and they sold and acquired properties when their fortunes dwindled or prospered. Helene and Francois, parents of Collette were the ideal couple, in love, forthright and attentive to the needs of their children. Silvio describes them knowingly, as he peels their past, with the story of Helene in her youth. Colette, their newlywed daughter wishes to have a life like her parents’ but secretly has a sordid affair with the young beau of another young and beautiful married townsgirl. Collette’s new husband, Jean perishes in a “murder” by the river. Her father, upon learning about the circumstances of the death of his son in-law from the farmers, pursues the incident to bring him justice.
The seeds that are sown in the farmland are now about to bear a dreadful harvest. Nemirovsky asks, as if to foreshadow what will come out of the quest to find the perpetrator of the crime, “If one knew what the outcome of seeds that are planted in the field, would one still plant the seeds anyway?”
At a tender 32 when Nemirovsky wrote this novel, she seemed able to assign these issues a universality that traversed the ruralness and isolation of the place and time that it occurred in, lending it a truth that is common among all men. When one is young, there is no vision of things to come, only happiness and pleasures of the heart. In old age, there is only hindsight of what was sought and lost. It is genius of her to be able to see that coming.
The book read like a French meal with good wine and forbidden desserts.
If you can read this, thank a teacher. 