Dimanche and Other Stories

TRANSLATED BY BRIDGET PATTERSON
WITH A PUBLISHER'S NOTE
280pp
ISBN 9781903155776

Irène Némirovsky, b.1903, has become one of France’s most famous writers. But after her death in 1942 she was virtually forgotten. It was only with the rediscovery of the manuscript of her novel Suite Française in a suitcase and its publication in France in 2004 and in the UK and USA in 2006 that her name started to become as well-known as it is today.   

Némirovsky was brought up in Tsarist Russia, but after the Revolution her family escaped to France, where they lived a comfortable bourgeois life in Paris and in Biarritz. Her first novel, David Golder, came out when she was 26 and she became instantly famous. The book was a penetrating glimpse of a world she knew well, the circle of successful or not-so-successful Russian Jewish businessmen, speculating ruthlessly in oil and minerals. David Golder is appallingly treated by his wife: she owes something to Némirovsky’s mother (from whom she was estranged most of her adult life). The book’s enormous success was based on the directness of its language, including crudities unusual in good literature.

But none of the later novels were as successful as David Golder and Némirovsky and her husband had two daughters to support, so she started to write short stories. The ten included in Dimanche are everything that a short story should be: beautifully written novels in miniature, fascinating, profound, all this and more. As in a Chekhov short story, little happens but everything happens. Whether describing the impatience of a girl waiting for her lover, the tortured relationships of a large family, or the emotions of someone fleeing the Nazis, Némirovsky is always an extremely astute observer, delicate, perceptive and ironic.                                                

Also available as a Persephone e-book.

Endpaper

'Rear Window' 1938, an artificial silk satin manufactured by  Coudurier, Fructus and Descher, Lyon.