FICTION: ANNE HAVERTYreviews The Misunderstanding By Irène Némirovsky Chatto and Windus, 164pp. £12.99
IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY’S LIFE was as brilliant as her death was horrific. Born in 1903, she was the pampered child of a rich Russian Jewish banker and came to live in Paris just in time to enjoy the fun and frolics of the Jazz Age. By her 30s she was the successful author of several dazzling novels.
History was on her side, but then it turned. In 1942 she died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, only a month after being deported from the village in Burgundy where she and her family were attempting to hide.
Only two days before her arrest she had sat in a pine forest working on a long ambitious novel based on War and Peace. That novel, a panoramic study of France under the Nazi occupation that would remain unfinished, was first published less than a decade ago as Suite Française.
Since then Némirovsky has had a kind of glorious second existence, in the literary sense. Suite Française has been followed by the reissue at regular intervals, and the first publications in English, of her previous books, including David Golder, The Wine of Solitude and The Dogs and the Wolves. Different though they are in theme and style from Suite Française, they’re no less extraordinary. This latest, The Misunderstanding, is her first novel, written when she was only 21.
We’re getting to read her backwards, like a film in reverse. This is fascinating in one way, like watching a flower close when we usually see it opening. And any novel written at 21 is remarkable as an early display of stamina and commitment. But the chances are it’s going to be an exercise in juvenile egoism and self-regard. The Misunderstanding is not like this, however. It is knowing, empathic and sophisticated: it’s a wonder that someone so young could have written it. And, unexpectedly, it’s more like her last book, Suite Française, than those that would come between. On the surface the story seems as simple as the book is slender. A thirtysomething single man, Yves Harteloy, falls in love at the beach resort of Hendaye with a young married woman, Denise Jessaint. Back in Paris, Denise and Yves, people of their brittle time and glamourous milieu, play out their affair until the summer comes around again.
Until Suite Française, Némirovsky was a self-avowed autobiographer. Her novels are obsessional dissections of her family and the world they moved in. Her mother, a venal, cold woman who disdained her daughter and husband, appears again and again as a character. So does her father, the poor Russian peasant made good who continues to be fear-stricken by the spectre of his former poverty and the historical perils of being a Jew. When Némirovsky was criticised for the harshness of her perception of Jews, she said in surprise: “But I’m only writing about Mama and Papa.”
Yves and Denise, though, come from the French Catholic bourgeoisie, and the only Jew, Yves’s employer, is benevolent but hardly figures. The extramarital affair, like the holiday resort, would be a theme in future novels. Némirovsky’s mother, with her serial affairs, was the template for those selfish, faithless, lustful wives of rich men. The love of Yves and Denise is ardent and well intentioned by comparison, and it’s Denise’s tender nature that makes Yves love her. The novel is essentially an examination of their separate expectations of each other and of how, in the time and place in history they find themselves, they cannot fulfil them.
Yves appears to be the perfect lover Denise is entitled to have. He looks the part and was brought up to be a wealthy do-nothing, a dilettante whose principal occupation would be the expression of a consciously cultivated and well-honed discrimination. He was meant to live the life of someone such as Victor, the real-life collector of netsukes and objets d’art in The Hare With Amber Eyes.
But the first World War got in the way. Yves spent it in the trenches. “Cold, filth death . . . Exhaustion, resignation, death . . . A long, long nightmare.” He came home from the war, but he is one of those who “had simply come home exhausted”.
Némirovsky’s depiction of Yves’s often petulant state of mind is cool and perceptive but also very moving. He is damaged emotionally and psychologically. He was unfit to see death as he saw it, up close in all its grotesquerie, and it has set him apart. You feel he will never be anything now but fretful and fatigued. The war has swept away his wealth as well. He has to do figures in an office for a living. He is an employee, a situation Denise regards with horror, though she overlooks it.
Denise doesn’t understand Yves. Her husband is one of those former soldiers who were able to pick up the pieces, knew how to keep his money or get more – and is conveniently absent for much of the time. And Yves doesn’t understand Denise. At least he has no sympathy for her need of him, her need for declarations. What he wants from her is a peace she is unable to give as he cannot give her what she needs.
Do they actually love each other as they believe? What is love? And what is the misunderstanding exactly? Or who is the misunderstood? As the translator Sandra Smith points out, the title in French, Le Malentendu, is ambiguous. The reader is not inclined or encouraged to take sides. Yves and Denise are both likeable people and good in their way, and you sympathise with their suffering, which is entirely credible. And Denise’s mother, who has a role to play, is not the villainous mother to come either.
What The Misunderstanding shares with all of Némirovsky’s books, however, is the shimmer of the writing. Its world is made as glowingly present nearly a century later as the pink effulgence of the evening skies is to its characters.
Anne Haverty’s most recent novel is The Free and Easy, published by Vintage
