I didn’t know who Irène Némerovsky was until this past autumn, when I ran across a collection of her works on the library fiction shelves. Her family fled the Russian Revolution when she was a teenager and eventually settled in France, where she began her career as a prolific and popular French author, got married, and had two daughters. As the child of a wealthy Jewish banker, she had escaped pogroms and Bolsheviks, but she was seemingly doomed to be hunted down. Unable to elude the Nazis, she died in Auschwitz in 1942, feeling bitterly alone and betrayed by her French homeland. Before her capture, she gave a notebook to her daughters, who kept it without opening it for decades. The notebook turned out to contain unfinished drafts for a novel series, Suite française, which were published in 2004.
I found Némerovsky’s writing striking for both its psychological depth and its gifted style. Her imagery is especially notable because it is richly multisensory. Many of her descriptions rely so heavily on auditory imagery that I feel immersed in the scene being created:
From inside the café came the muddled sound of voices, people calling out; the crashing of billiard balls, trays banging down on the wooden tables, chess pieces being moved around the boards. Now and again, you could make out the hesitant, shrill fanfare of a small band, muffled by the other noise in the café.
(All of the quotes in this blog entry are from the Everyman’s Library compilation David Golder, the Ball, Snow in Autumn, the Courilof Affair, which was translated by Sandra Smith and published in 2008.) Here is another example of sound-heavy imagery, where a soundscape illustrates time passing (literally, in the case of the clocks!):
She could hear the sound of cars in the street below. . . . But then the cars drove off, the sound of their engines growing fainter as they disappeared into the night. The later it got, however, the fewer cars there were, and many long minutes went by without a single sound coming from the street. It was as deserted as a country lane; there was only the noise of the nearby tramway, and the muted hooting of car horns, far away.
. . . In the empty drawing room, a little clock struck the hour with a hurried little chime, like silvery bells; the one in the dining room gave an insistent reply, and from the other side of the street, the bell of a large clock on the front of a church rang slowly and solemnly, growing louder as it marked the time that had passed.
Rain figures heavily in The Courilof Affair, and Némerovsky’s precise imagery requires us to pay attention. In one scene, raindrops fall from wet leaves “noisily, with a sharp, metallic sound.” On the lamplit street outside the cafè featured in the first quote above, “rain bounced heavily off the pavement in bright sparks.”
The senses of touch, smell, and taste are not as prominent in Némerovsky’s descriptions as sound, but they’re often present, subtly enriching the scenes. In fact, I started counting the number of senses Némerovsky included in each description to see if she’d cover all five in one. She hit four numerous times!
Once in France, my mother would leave me for a few hours with some farmers, the Bauds, who lived in a house beside the lake. . . . There I drank piping hot coffee. I ate warm bread with chestnuts. The Bauds’ house—with its fires, the delicious aroma of coffee, the screaming children—was, to me, paradise on earth. They had a terrace, a sort of large wooden balcony that looked out over the lake, and, in winter, it was covered in snow and creaking ice.
Technically that passage doesn’t include taste imagery, but I can easily imagine the “piping hot coffee” and “warm bread with chestnuts,” so maybe we can stretch the point a little and call it a five-sense description.
Finally, here is a quote from her last story published during her lifetime, “Les Vierges,” which I am including not for any imagery but simply because it’s beautiful: “Look at me. I am alone now, but my solitude was not chosen or wanted, it is the worst one, the humiliated, bitter solitude of abandonment and betrayal.”