The Old Fire
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The building looks tired, the ivy-covered roof sagging above the brick-work, like a weary giant gasping for breath. There’s a car parked under the hazelnut tree. Bracken forces its way between the cracks in the front steps. Through the window, I can see a light inside.
In the wake of her father’s death, Agathe leaves New York and returns to her childhood home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. Agathe and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all that time apart. Now, they must empty their home before it is knocked down. Véra stopped speaking when she was six, and as the pair clean and sift through a lifetime’s worth of belongings, old memories and resentments surface.
Tender, melancholic and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin’s most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, of the unsaid and the unanswered, it is also a graceful and profound exploration of how loss and grief can live alongside life and abundance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the quietly affecting latest from Dusapin (Winter in Sokcho), two sisters reunite to clear out their family home in the French countryside. Narrator Agathe, the elder at 30, is a successful scriptwriter living with her partner, Irvin, in New York City. Vera, three years younger, remained in France, where she mysteriously stopped speaking when she was six and communicates by writing. Their father has died and the house will be demolished in nine days. As they empty the house, memories surface: of their mother leaving when Agathe was nine, of life with their father, who worked long hours, and of Agathe's responsibility for her younger sister ("We were bound together by our shared language of silence and cries"). Dusapin wonderfully evokes the complexity of the sisters' relationship via flashbacks, such as Agathe's defending of Vera from bullies and Agathe's humiliation when she was invited to a party and left stranded on the steps of a cathedral. Other local landmarks such as caves and a cheese factory form an evocative picture of the rural setting and its hold on the characters. It's a beautiful rendering of unresolved adolescence.
