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

Fires of Autumn by Iréne Némirovsky (written in 1940, first published in French in 1957, translated by Sandra Smith, 2015)

My Posts on Iréne Némirovsky  (1903 to 1942)

Like most of her readers, my literary love affair with Iréne Némirovsky (1903 to 1942) began when I read her acknowledged by all master work Suite Francaise.  I then read her most autobiographical novel, The Wine of Solitude.  Next I read her very interesting David Golder centering on a White Russian family living in Paris.  From there I moved on to a very fun and wickedly funny novella about a teenage girl's revenge on her mother (Iréne Némirovsky did have "mother issues"), The Ball.  I also read her The Courilof Affair and Snow in Autumn, both deal with White Russians living in Paris. Némirovsky was from a wealthy businessman White Russian family that left Kiev during the Russian Revolution and ended up, after some time in Finland, in Paris. 

My previous read was her Jezebel, a seeringly powerful work about a woman obsessed with her beauty and sexual allure. 

To new readers of Némirovsky, besides telling you are so lucky to have come upon her, I would suggest you consider starting with Fires of Autumn as it is set in Paris from 1914 to 1941 and shows French society in period just as Suite Francaise begins.  The center of the novel, Bernard, volunteers in 1914 to fight the Germans. He is just eighteen.  Némirovsky does a brilliant job of portraying the horrors of warfare.  We see how four years in the army, when he entered the war everyone in Paris said the war would be over in a few months, changes him.  Némirovsky does a marvelous job of showing how the war impacted Bernard and French society.  After the war we a society gone money mad.  We are there when Bernhard gets involved as a front for a man who brokers trade with American companies.  There is a beautifully developed romance and there are regrettable infidelities. 

There are wondeful meals, artfully described elegant apartments, business intrigues, family drama, descriptions of Paris and much more in this wonderful work.

The final section of Fires of Autumn takes us to the start of World War II.  We see the impact of the war on daily life in Paris. Némirovsky does just a brilliant job depicting the city.  Bernard and his son both join the French Army.  I do not want to spoil the very dramatic closing chapters of the novel but I think the close will deeply move many readers, as it did me.  There is a knife thrust at the heart of Bernhard and French society in one sentence that is just devastating.  

As a practical matter, there are two Némirovsky novels available as Kindles and a collection of ten short stories, of which I have yet read only one, I have yet to read.  I really wish there were thirty more and I condemn the Germans for her murder at Auschwitz for depriving the world of these works.