Dimanche and other stories - Nemirovsky, Irene
Summary: Collects ten short stories written between 1934 and 1942, focusing on such themes as social class, familial tensions, the French bourgeoisie, questions of religion, and personal identity. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
The reclamation and translation of Némirovsky's fiction continues with this gorgeous collection of short stories. One can appreciate why the tale that carries the book's 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 Némirovsky 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, Némirovsky was an empathic, prescient, and boldly clinical dramatist in the mode of Chekhov, Maupassant, and Colette. A Némirovsky biography is on the way. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
