Hand over hand, bloody-knuckled, bedraggled, and panting, I’ve been climbing back into the habit of reading. I flat-out gave up on it a few years ago and watched my mind and vocabulary plummet as a result. I’ve always had two sources of linguistic stimulus in my life. The first was a fantastic and mis-matched gang of like-minded friends that I ran with in high school and college. Every conversation was a good-humored contest of wits, a battle for the obscurest allusion and le mot juste. The second, of course, was reading (a drug I first tasted with Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke essays in Rolling Stone.) I can’t see those old friends like a I once did, but the books are always available.
So then, what to read? Why, Everything, of course!
My better half has joined a book club. I am not invited to attend as I am anatomically insufficient. I am a man. This club is strictly ladies only. See what the ERA era hath wrought! I decided to stop being bitter and just read the books anyway. This month that book is Fire In The Blood, by Irene Nemirovsky. It’s notable as it was long lost while the author became fuel for the fires of Auschwitz after being seized and deported from France. This fate is doubly horrible as she was only in France because, as a Russian Jew, she high-tailed it out of her homeland in 1917 as the Bolsheviks were doing their best to smash anything that didn’t fit into the Wonderful Worker’s Paradise.
It’s a slim novel. It had the worrisome stench of Romance about it when I first picked it up. There were a few pages in the middle that flipped-flopped the relationships and laid on the revelations faster than General Hospital. But taken as a whole… it’s near-perfect in its pacing. The facts are merely a framework. The heart of the work is the worn-thin soul of the old Frenchman who narrates the details of the lives of his rural relations.
A few observations:
1. How much must an author experience to write realistically? Silvio, the aforementioned old man, is written with extreme clarity. We’re in his head for 200 pages and his words never strike an off note. He’s the sort of character that Irene encountered frequently while living in France, but she was neither old, nor a man, nor French. Secondly, the story is wrapped up in affairs — short term, long term, easy, disastrous. How true was Irene to the man that typed up her manuscripts and hid her work during the panicked end? Perhaps these questions are illegal: Be a New Critic. The Work stands alone, right? Whatever…
2. One could argue that the central character is not a person at all but rather the titular concoction, the “Fire In The Blood.” Roughly the passion of youth, this Fire leads the rational to crazy, temps the responsible to reckless, boils over when it recognizes itself in another. However, this is a moral novel. It’s not just about sex. It’s moral not in a “do the right thing” kind of way, but rather it is morally complete in its understanding of the complexity of what may be mistaken as lust:
“It wasn’t just about the pleasures of the flesh. No it wasn’t that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It is the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire…”
This Fire is madness, of course. We only allow it to happen behind closed doors, in far-away locations. It is hidden in the attic like a crazy aunt. It is not spoke of. But the question that the novel begs is this: What is real? The days spent working, planting, tilling, raising crops and children, or is this madness also a reality? Is this Fire that we carry around in our hearts and minds — a Fire that not only opposes but is lethal to Responsible life — is this Fire even more real as the spirit is more real than the flesh? As Heaven, though unseen, may be more real than Earth?
3. Not to ruin the end, but the last line leaves questions. The last line is a warning. The last line reminds us that fires burn, consume, and die out. It is their nature. A life may last a hundred years. A fire comes and goes in a day, in an hour:
“We didn’t move. She seemed to be drinking me in, breathing in my heart. As for me, by the time I finally let her go I knew I had already begun to love her less.”
So ladies, thanks for a good read. See you next month!
