Master of Souls by Irene Némirovsky (1940?) Translated by Sandra Smith 2022 - 216 Pages

 Suite Francaise is the acknowledged master work of Iréne Nemirovsky. I first read this book during Paris in July in 2015. I loved that book so much that I added her to my read all I can list. Since then I have read and posted on 12 of her novels and four short stories. I have also read two biographies On her way to Auschwitz in a cattle car she carried with her a copy of the notebook of Katherine Mansfield. She died there after a month at age forty. She was a very prolific writer with about a novel a year. The Germans cheated the world out of at least thirty wonderful works. I cannot find a way to forgive or forget this.

Master of Souls is a newly translated work  by Némirovsky. Sandra Smith has translated numerous other of her  works.

I am very grateful for the publication of this work but I am frustrated as no where in the text or online that I could find is the original publication date given.  There must be a back story as to why it is just now being published and I wish we had been provided this information.  

"A starving young immigrant doctor of Italian and Greek descent, Dario Asfar struggles to establish his practice, and is desperate to provide for his wife and newborn son. When the vulgar, self-indulgent French aristocrat Philippe Wardes dismisses his personal physician’s advice to abstain from alcohol and gambling, he turns to Dr. Asfar for a second opinion. Understanding the opportunity before him, Dario obliges Wardes, and others like him, knowing well that the rich want to eat of the forbidden fruit without paying for the sin. At first Dario’s plan is just for survival, but soon he begins to enjoy increasing rewards by selling himself as a master of souls who can miraculously cure restless minds, and in so doing sheds light on the lies we tell ourselves in the name of family and love." From the publisher 

We follow Dario from struggles to find patients to years later when he is a celebrity physician to the wealthy.  He is a bit of a charlatan.  No matter how much money he has it is never enough.  He cheats on his wife and dodges creditors.  He expressed feelings that his ethnic background made it more difficult to get patients.  There is a lot about the business aspects of practicing medicine in Paris between the wars.

"Murdered during the Holocaust, novelist Irène Némirovsky finally achieved the recognition she deserved long after her death. Némirovsky’s family fled the Russian Revolution and settled in France in 1919. She studied at the Sorbonne and began writing at eighteen. She published her first novel, L’Enfant Genial, in 1927. Her next two novels, David Golder (1929) and Le Bal (1930), were great successes and were adapted for the screen. Despite her literary achievements and popular acclaim, she struggled with antisemitism and converted to Catholicism in 1939. In 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus. In 1990 her daughter Elisabeth Gille published Némirovsky’s Suite Française, a novel about the invasion of Paris. The novel won the Prix Renaudot in 2004, a first for a posthumous author" From https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/nemirovsky-irene

The Enclopedia of Jewish Women

Mel Ulm