Dimanche and Other Stories
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Since the publication of Suite Française in English in 2006 some of Némirovsky’s other novels have been published in the UK. Dimanche and Other Stories is the first volume of the short stories to have been translated into English. There are ten, written between 1934 and 1942, two of which prefigure Suite Française. Their settings are bourgeois Paris, where Némirovsky’s parents lived after they left Russia, Biarritz, and the Russia of her childhood. Each story is a novel in miniature: 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 German invasion, Némirovsky is always an acute observer, delicate, perceptive, ironic. Kate Saunders in The Times called the stories ‘finished down to the last full stop – forming the most ravishing collection I have read for years.’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ten luminous and newly translated stories by N mirovsky (Suite Fran aise), who died at Auschwitz, expose the miseries that undermine happy families. Set mostly in France, where the author immigrated after the Russian revolution, these accomplished tales create worlds full of secrets and treacheries, such as in the title story, set on one typical Sunday at a bourgeois Parisian home where the middle-aged wife and mother, Agnes once embittered by her husband's taking of a mistress, but now apathetic to his wanderings remembers her own lost love. Flesh and Blood is a masterpiece of familial subterfuge revolving around an aged matriarch who falls ill and tries to keep peace among her three self-absorbed sons and their grasping wives. In The Spell, a young visitor to a messy Russian household gleans dark mysteries around a lovelorn aunt's romantic sorcery; several of the tales, such as The Spectator and Monsieur Rose, capture aloof, prosperous gentlemen fleeing Paris in advance of the Nazis. In this superlative translation, N mirovsky's characters emerge full-fleshed, and her voice remains timeless and relevant.
