Fire in the Blood By Irene Nemirovsky
Translated by Sandra Smith
Chatto & Windus £12.99, 176 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39

Fire in the Blood is a novella, hitherto unpublished, written by Irene Nemirovsky between 1938 and 1941; she may well have been adding finishing touches to it in 1942, the year she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died.

Nemirovsky was writing her remarkable novel sequence Suite Francaise – widely acclaimed on its posthumous release in 2004 – at the same time, and in the same place: Issy-l’Eveque, a small village in Burgundy. In 1937, Nemirovsky had found a nanny for her youngest daughter in this village, where she fled in 1940 to take refuge from the anti-Semitic diktats of the Vichy state. Indeed it is more than probable that it was an inhabitant of this small place who denounced her to the police. For these reasons, and for itself, Fire in the Blood will delight her thousands of devotees. In it the very houses and hotels of Issy-l’Eveque are identified by name; indeed the novella could well be used as a guidebook to it and to the woods and fields which surround the Burgundian village where Nemirovsky spent her last years.

With Suite Francaise, her worldwide bestseller about France and its people during the occupation by the Germans, Nemirovsky’s canvas was large. Fire in the Blood is a miniature, but has all the considerable virtues and all the (very minor) flaws of the former work.

This is the story of Monsieur Silvio, his cousin’s wife, Helene, her second husband Francois, and of the marriages and children, houses, mills and properties that bind them in ties of love and hatred, passion and venality.

Silvio, an old man now (it is 1938 as he tells his tale) is, like his creator, a master storyteller. The twists and turns of his revelations are buried in a magnificently atmospheric portrait of rural France at its most profonde, where “everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbours, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn’t give a thought to the rest of the world.”

Nemirovsky’s delineation of the life of the French peasant is more than a little stereotypical. But, as is always the case with her work, she is so clever, quick and observant that every character in the story bounds into life and cliches are forgotten in the sheer longing to turn every page, to unravel the secrets Silvio reveals. “This region has something restrained yet savage about it ... that is reminiscent of another time, long past,” writes Silvio. And it is this juggling of youth and age, of young passion and older love, that provides “all the heavy, bitter spicy food of life” – that atmosphere you find, in English, in the novels of Thomas Hardy or in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between.

What is human love? How many such loves can there be? The last lines of Fire in the Blood address this question and quiver with all of Nemirovsky’s wry wisdom and with the emotional intelligence that was her greatest gift as a writer – blessings she uses to fascinating effect in this fine novella.

Carmen Callil is author of ‘Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland’ (Vintage)