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

Les liaisons dangereuse by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos- 1782- 409 Pages- translated and edited by Douglas Parmée; introduction by David Coward- 1995- (Oxford World Classics)

 Les liaisons dangereuse by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos- 1782- 409 Pages- translated and edited by Douglas Parmée; introduction by David Coward- 1995- (Oxford World Classics)

This was the most read French novel during the 18th Century. It was condemned by the Church which served to increase reader demand.

"The lesson in happiness in Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a simple but profound one: happiness is real, not a pose. If you pretend to be something you’re not—and especially if you feign emotions you don’t have—sooner or later you will be found out. Les Misérables is a demonstration of how meaningless happiness is in the face of the suffering of others. Les Liaisons Dangereuses takes this a step further. It’s about one of the worst things any human being can do: actively and intentionally destroy the happiness of others. The one pleasure the Marquise de Merteuil and Valmont take is in dismantling any happy moment that others might be experiencing. Choderlos de Laclos shows us what he really thinks of this by giving them their comeuppance. This is a novel that leaves you feeling unsettled and unsure as to how exactly you’ve been manipulated." Ver Goskup

I added this book to my wishlist after reading Viv Groskup's chapter on it in Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature. It is an epistolary novel, a form which allows authors to make us of their characters private thoughts before the interior monologue came into usage. I was happy to see mentions of Samuel Richardson's classic epistolary work Clarrisa, 1748, in several letters.

(L'Abbé Antoine François de Prévost (1697-1763) was 

its first translator in 1751, later it was translated by Rousseau and Denis Dedirow, among others.)

Wikipedia has a decent plot summary so I will just make a few observations.

I do really hope I can watch the 1988 movie starring Glenn Close.  

It took me a bit of time to be drawn into the work. The letters are not fully candid, often aimed at manipulation of the receiver. We are drawn into a world of corruption brought about by the boredom of aristocrats. Seducing married women is a popular pastime, servants can be bribed to shield affairs from husbands. The letters are replete with sycophantic prevarication. It is an interesting challenge to slowly develop our understanding of intentions.

This is the author's only work besides a light opera and a few poems.He wrote it in six months while on leave from serving as a general in the French Army. He also is credited with inventing the modern artillery shell.

Viv Groskup sums up the power of this novel perfectly

"It is uncwhether the Choderlos de Laclos meant this novel as a provocative piece of entertainment intended as a celebration of amorality or as a political statement damning the aristocracy for their decadence and cruelty. Is it a celebration of libertinism? Or a vicious critique of it? The author’s intentions can never be known. Which I think is rather wonderful, as it means that we get to decide for ourselves. Furthermore, this boo is a perfect example of the sort of book that challenges your expectations and your morality over time. There are times when I can read (or watch) Les Liaisons Dangereuses and find it hilarious and delicious and clever. And there are times when I can come to it and think that it is a depiction of the absolute worst of humanity, so much so that it makes me want to weep forever."

Mel Ulm

Life A User’s Manuel by Georges Perec - 661 Pages- 1978 - translated from French 1987 by David Bellos

Life A User’s Manuel by Georges Perec is a fascinating novel entirely taking place at eight p.m June 23, 1975 in a hundred unit apartment house in Paris.  For sure it is very creative, at times amazing. Maybe those who call it one of The greatest  novels written since World War II and call it a work of genius are right.  Leaving that question for others, for sure it is the product of extreme high intelligence deeply focused.  Nine years in the making, it tells the story of the residents of the building in 99 chapters and an epilogue.  It might seem as you read it to be mainly a series of stories, some really interesting going deeply into the residents lives with wonderful descriptions of furniture, art, food, relationships and much more.  Everything is all tied together.  The book abounds with hidden and real puzzles, literary references, artistic allusiions, some real some who knows.  Culturally this is a very rich book. It will leave many readers, as it did me, stunned. He loved lists and the novel abounds in them.  It is also a social history of Paris in 1975, a very learned treatise on art and no doubt many things that went way over my head. 

Paul Auster has written a wonderful essay on Perec and Life A User’s Manual

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/15/books/the-bartlebooth-follies.html

I loved this strange book.

Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Perec was born the only son of Polish-Jewish parents who both died in the second world war: his father fighting for the French army, and his mother at Auschwitz. He was born Georges Peretz but his parents had changed his name when he was young. When the Nazis came through the Alpine town where he had taken refuge with relatives, the name Perec, being plausibly Breton, did not attract suspicion. Thus, his survival as a child was linked with linguistic coincidence and wordplay. In La Disparition, Perec is not able to say his own name or use the words "mére", "pére" or "parents".

Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. 

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

A heavy smoker throughout his life, Perec was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981 and he died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994. From various sources.

Sadly this is the only translated into English of his works available as a Kindle.

George Perec joins my growing lists of favourite writers that I had never even heard of a week before I began reading them.

Mel u