Description
A New York Review Books Original
Separated from her mother—the famed author of Suite Française—during World War II, Irène Némirovsky’s daughter offers a “nuanced, eloquent portrait of a complicated woman” in a series of memoirs that reimagine her mother’s life (The Washington Post)
Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn’t consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger.
It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote, in The Mirador, her mother’s memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made Némirovsky famous, takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irene herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of “moderation, freedom, and generosity,” where at last she is happy.
Some thirteen years later Irène picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door. Written a decade before the publication of Suite Française made Irène Némirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), The Mirador is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.
About the Author
Elizabeth Subercaseaux
Elizabeth Subercaseaux was born in Chile, the great-great-granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann. She is the best-selling author of ten books. Her nonfiction includes Michelle, a biography of the first woman to be elected president in Chile, and the amusing feminist manifesto, The Ten Things a Chilean Woman Should Never Do. Subercaseaux lives in Pennsylvania.
Marina Harss
Marina Harss translations include For Solo Violin (Per Vionlino Solo), a war memoir by Aldo Zargani, and stories in The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda, by Sonia Rivera-Vald. Her translations have also appeared in Bomb, Brooklyn Rail, and Autadafe. She is a researcher at The New Yorker, and lives in New York City.
Also by this author: Conjugal Love, Stories from the City of God
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