“They only think about living in peace; they have everything they need to be happy: work and youth.”
Reading a book by Irène Némirovsky means taking care of yourself, loving yourself. For every topic she addresses, she is capable of capturing hidden nuances, shamefully suppressed perspectives, and the most appropriate words. Whether we find ourselves in a wealthy, bourgeois family in the city or at a provincial landowner’s court, Némirovsky is capable of penetrating to the heart of matters. The passage of time in the eyes of the elderly, the sadness of young people forced to live a miserable life due to poverty at birth, the anxiety of a young woman unable to hear a voice in the background at a dance, unrequited love for a missed greeting, the morass of thoughts anchored to clichés—these are all elements that Némirovsky manages to describe and convey with extraordinary precision. And we wonder how, in just a few years of life, she was able to understand humanity so deeply.
Silvio, the narrator who accompanies us throughout the book, lives in the early twentieth-century French countryside. He is a lonely and misanthropic landowner who, despite the entreaties of his widowed mother, spent his youth traveling the world, driven by the warmth of the blood typical of a certain youth, minimizing the family’s rich inheritance. Once he returns home, now elderly and disillusioned, he experiences the twilight of life without much left to ask of others or of himself. This awareness allows him to better observe, with an analytical eye, the human relationships with those around him and the narrowness of provincial life, where everything is appearance.
And perhaps this is precisely what the book has left us with: the sense that behind people’s normality there always lies something we have not yet learned to see.
The failed marriage of a distant relative, an unexpected death, an act of violence driven by unquenched passions, make Silvio realize that the warmth of the blood, which he thought he had lost forever, actually still flows, faintly, in his veins.
Némirovsky manages to make us experience human stories and passions with a precision rare in literature. Old people, children, wrong loves, infamies, unspoken loves, acts of violence, and much more are captured on paper with bold yet measured words, untouched by the passage of time. He recounts passions seemingly distant from us, and makes us discover, page after page, that they are not at all.
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Irène Némirovsky, Il calore del sangue, Adelphi, Milano, 2008
Original edition: Chaleur du sang, Éditions Denoël, Paris, 2007