Book description
The Misunderstanding is Irène Némirovsky's first novel,
written when she was just twenty-one and published in a literary
journal two years later. An intense story of self-destructive and
blighted love, it is also a tragic satire of French society after
the Great War.
Yves Harteloup, scarred by the war, is a disappointed young man, old
money fallen on hard times, who returns for the summer to the rich,
comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful
childhood holidays. He becomes infatuated by a beautiful, bored young
woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business.
Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves' intensity, Denise falls
passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return
to his mundane office job.
In the mournful Paris autumn their love founders on mutual
misunderstanding, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between a life of
idle wealth and the demands of making a living, between a woman's
needs and a man's way of loving. As Denise is driven mad with desire
and jealous suspicion, Yves, too sure of her, tortures himself and her
with his emotional ambivalence. Taking her sophisticated mother's
advice, Denise takes action...which she may regret forever.
With a sharp satirical eye and a characteristic perception for the
fault lines in human relationships, Irène Némirovsky's first novel
shows sure signs of the brilliant novelist she was to become.
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a
successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution
for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of
David Golder
,
Le Bal
,
The Courilof Affair
,
All Our Worldly Goods
and other works published in her lifetime or afterwards, such as
Suite Française
and
Fire in the Blood
.
The Misunderstanding
(
Le Malentendu
) was first published in France in
Les OEuvres libres
in 1926. Némirovsky was prevented from publishing when the Germans
occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from
Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evêque (in German
occupied territory). She died in Auschwitz in 1942.
