THE OLD FIRE

A writer returns to rural France and, with her silent sister, must empty the family home before it’s knocked down.

Agathe is a screenwriter living in New York. Her most recent film won a prize at an Italian film festival, and that success landed her a job adapting a George Perec novel, W, or The Memory of Childhood. Agathe was just 15 when she moved to the U.S. permanently; now 30, she’s called to France by her sister, Véra, who asks for help clearing out their family estate, finally being sold—to a company that plans to destroy it—after their father’s death five years ago. Settled into the crumbling building for nine days with Véra, who has been aphasic since childhood, Agathe is unsettled by everything around her, from the ants in the house, to the absence of people in the village. Hunters roam the forest surrounding the estate, being dangerously inattentive to the sisters’ presence. Agathe is haunted by the complicated life she left behind in New York—a partner and their attempts to start a family—as well as by the past that surrounds her in France. As the sisters sort through a lifetime of their family’s belongings, Agathe feels oppressed by the weight of her memories and the question of whether she’s left Véra without the protector and companion Agathe once was for her younger sister. Dusapin is a writer gifted in atmosphere; every image in this slim novel oozes with portent and symbolic weight, from the caves in which the sisters played as children to the novel that Agathe adapts. The translation from French by Higgins reflects the prose’s broody lyricism.

A delicate and elegant novel that asks what we owe the ones we love.