“Love, my dear, is a feeling of luxury.”
The story is about a love that shouldn’t have happened, just as it shouldn’t have died. On one side, we have Yves Harteloup, a wealthy man who has lost much of his wealth and is forced to live like a common clerk in early 1900s Paris, and Denise Jessaint, the young wife of a wealthy businessman, Yves’s comrade in arms during the Great War.
The two meet during a vacation in the small Basque town of Hendaye, where they usually spend the summer swimming and hiking. The overwhelming passion of the two young lovers cannot help but overwhelm the reader: the emotions, the regrets, the concessions, the bad moods, and all those waves of irreparable mistakes that overwhelm relationships born on the shore (and beyond). Yves’s false masculine certainties and Denise’s true feminine uncertainties will transform into burdens too great upon their return to Paris.
The text isn’t about love at first sight, burning through the time of passion, but about intense love, the way the two protagonists know how to love. Unfortunately, their inability to understand each other’s needs leads them to a dead end, from which the only way out is abandonment. The way these feelings are described and depicted will certainly make you feel bad, but it will also take you back to the past, because we’ve all experienced a love that came too soon or too late, ended without a real reason, and that we’ll remember forever.
We’re biased; we’re talking about one of our favorite authors, capable of carving furrows with her pen without overdoing it. Her writing is lofty in its simplicity, a profound understanding of human feelings, and the ability to convey them on ordinary paper. Published in its first edition in 1926, when the author was just over twenty years old, this book represented her literary debut, which immediately placed her in the pantheon of writers who must be read in one’s lifetime.
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Irène Némirovsky, Il malinteso, Adelphi, Milano, 2010
Original edition: Le Malentendu, Fayard, Paris, 1926