Fire in the Blood

By Irène Némirovsky, Published 2007

“In the end it all comes down to the same thing, 
the same desire...the same roaring, all-consuming 
tidal wave of love.” 

Fire in the Blood was also published after Némirovsky’s death. Smaller in scale and scope than her masterwork Suite Française, this novel is a brief meditation on passion, youth and old age. Inspired by the notebooks she kept as a teenager, Némirovsky wanted to respect the past and show how youth slowly becomes wisdom.

In the summer of 1938 she reread Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Within a Budding Grove) and highlighted this specific passage:

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.” (133)

The book’s older narrator Sylvestre, returns to the quiet village of his youth hoping for solitude. Némirovsky excels at describing French provincial life, most likely because the village has striking similarities to the one she and her family lived in until her arrest by the Nazis. Her narrator notes: “This region, in the middle of France, is both wild and rich. Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbors, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn’t give a thought to the rest of the world” (4).

However, a tragedy awakens in Sylvestre long dormant memories of a passionate love affair from his youth. “It wasn’t just about the pleasures of the flesh. No, it wasn’t that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire...That was what we wanted” (127).