La Femme de don Juan" ("Don Juan’s Wife") takes the form of a long letter written by a dying servant to the daughter of an old employer revealing her mother’s dark secret. Le sortilege (“The Spell”) is the story set in Russia. It is a story about an adult relationship told through the eyes of a young girl who really doesn’t understand what is happening.
Liens du Sang (“Flesh and Blood”), the longest story in the volume, examines family relationships as a pride of older children gather together to deal with their elderly mother’s sickness and their own hopes and fears, jealousies and pettiness. In Le spectateur (“The Spectator”), an aging dilettante from a neutral country trying to leave France at the beginning of the war, discovers that neutrality is not necessarily going to keep one safe. Each story focuses like a laser beam on the vagaries of the human condition, and the ironies that abound in human relations.
Whether she is describing the torturous impatience of a young girl waiting for a lover who doesn’t show up or the labyrinth of relationships in a large family no longer close, Nemirovsky is always the most astute of observers. And always those observations are presented with a typical understated irony.
At the end of Le confidente, the husband who has learned the truth about his recently deceased wife from a woman he thought was her friend explains why that truth is irrelevant. It is characteristic Nemirovsky: "He now understood that he had loved an illusion, a shadow. He knew with absolute certainty that he had at last learned the truth. But he was more tormented than ever because he understood what Camille could not grasp: that his wife’s soul, her wit and intelligence, were of no importance—all that was superfluous. What really mattered was the gentle movement of her shoulders when she turned her head toward him, the shape and warmth of her breast, the expression of her face, her tone of voice, the quick, bored way she pushed him aside when he approached her when she wanted to escape him (and now he knew why). This was what he would never get over."
