2024 Book Review #4: Le vieil incendie by Elisa Shua Dusapin

“Le vieil incendie” by Swiss-based Franco-Korean 31-year-old writer Elisa Shua Dusapin spins a familiar tale of emptying a home following a parent’s death, with nine days to do so, but with a twist. In this case, the protagonist’s sister hasn’t spoken since childhood when their parents were fighting.

The main character Agathe betrayed her speechless sister when she left her family in the remote Perigord part of France as a teenager to go write dialogues and screenplays for films out of New York City, making the grieving multi-layered, that of her father, but also of her relationship to her sister she used to protect and speak for, who is doing just fine now, and of her intense French family life, surroundings and friendships of yore.

It makes her question her new American life where she is trying but struggling to start a new family.

It’s a one day evocative, poetic, flowery, philosophical read, both rugged and delicate. It’s full of rediscovering the past through the nature, fauna and flora that still is barely hanging on in special parts of the world.

It spoke to my own divides, growing up dislocated geographically from the culture I was being raised in, and to the faraway distance I now have to my siblings and parents, in China and remote parts of France.

In that space, there is so much to write about, sometimes without words, a feat Dusapin accomplishes, as the side character here no longer speaks, her aphasia a metaphor for being able to always experience life transcendentally.

I read an interesting review about this book and surprisingly found it for cheap on Amazon in its original French, which I try to keep up on my francophone island in Reno.

The author has started finding a following in translated versions of her earlier work, including in English, especially for her debut Winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea, which a visiting French cartoonist and French Korean woman who works as a receptionist (re)discover together.

Like for “Le vieil incendie” it is about the divisions within ourselves and how we seek out shared identities and intimacy in our relationships, but can never completely chase bittersweet alienation.