Dimanche and Other Stories

Starred review from February 1, 2010
Ten luminous and newly translated stories by Némirovsky (Suite Française
), 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, Némirovsky's characters emerge full-fleshed, and her voice remains timeless and relevant.

April 1, 2010
The reclamation and translation of N'mirovskys fiction continues with this gorgeous collection of short stories. One can appreciate why the tale that carries the books title was so designated, Dimanche is a jewel, refracting so much of human experience through the prism of one interminable and heartbreaking Sunday in the life of a French family whose ties are growing frayed. But the title of an even more encompassing tale, Liens du sang (flesh and blood) is the better phrase for what N'mirovsky explores in these elegant, magnetic, and devastating stories of marriage, mothers and daughters, youth and age, rich and poor. Each faceted, cutting tale exposes the barely concealed resentments and envy underlying marriages desiccated by routinely unfaithful husbands, martyred wives, and shiny, selfish children, especially beautiful daughters who hold their muted mothers in contempt. A Russian Jewish emigrant to France who died of typhus at Auschwitz at age 39, N'mirovsky was an empathic, prescient, and boldly clinical dramatist in the mode of Chekhov, Maupassant, and Colette. A N'mirovsky biography is on the way.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)