The Misunderstanding
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Irène Némirovsky
Title Page
Translator’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Preface to the French Edition
Copyright
About the Book
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.
About the Author
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 soon after, such as the posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. The Dogs and the Wolves, now appearing for the first time in English, was published in France in spring 1940, just months before France fell to the Nazis. She 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). It was here that Irène began writing Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.
Also by Irène Némirovsky
Suite Française
David Golder
Le Bal (including Snow in Autumn)
Fire in the Blood
The Courilof Affair
All Our Worldly Goods
Jezebel
The Dogs and the Wolves
The Wine of Solitude
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The French title of this novel – Le Malentendu – like many of Némirovsky’s titles, presents a challenge to a translator as it embodies many meanings: ‘the misunderstanding’ as a specific event, or ‘the person who is misunderstood’ or ‘incompatibility’ when applied to a couple. Némirovsky’s novel explores every aspect of these meanings.
In her first novel as in many of her works, Némirovsky closely examines an extra-marital affair. This recurring theme in her fiction undoubtedly stemmed from her parents’ situation. Her mother had numerous lovers, and Némirovsky must have witnessed first-hand the effects of such affairs on a marriage and on her adored father. Even in this early novel, however, she is able to see both sides of the question and alternates between writing from the perspective of the man and the woman.
In the 1920s, when The Misunderstanding was published, social attitudes towards marriage were beginning to change and this new thinking is reflected here. But the novel also deals with the effects of the Great War on young men who survived it, as well as with the psychological and economic damage caused by the war to a part of French society: many members of the leisured classes lost their fortunes and were suddenly forced to work for a living. In this novel, most of the problems are caused by the difference in status between Denise Jessaint, ‘a young wife doted upon by a husband who earned a lot of money’, and Yves Harteloup, formerly wealthy but now forced to work in an office. Némirovsky presents this situation with an ironic perspective: morality isn’t the issue, just money. ‘“When I’m with her,” he thought with remarkable irritation, “I always have to be mentally wearing a dinner jacket.”’
When reading The Misunderstanding, I was struck by the echoes of Madame Bovary: both novels explore the thoughts and feelings of bored wives with heightened ideas of romance as they fall passionately in love and enter into affairs. (And Némirovsky did acknowledge Flaubert as an influence.) However, there is a twist in this tale: it is the woman who is wealthy and the man poor. Yves and Denise struggle to overcome their differences as a tribute to their love.
The Misunderstanding was written in 1924 when Irène Némirovsky was barely twenty-one years old, but not published until 1926. It was then reissued in 1930, after the enormous success of the novel David Golder had made her famous. Its language, more consciously romantic than in her later work, has the intensity and enthusiasm of youth, but The Misunderstanding is an astute, lyrical novel that shows remarkable psychological insight.
Sandra Smith
Cambridge, March 2012
1
YVES WAS SLEEPING, like a little boy, soundly, deeply. He had buried his head in the crook of his elbow, instinctively rediscovering, in that intense, trusting sleep of the past, the movements and even the smile of a serious, innocent child; he was dreaming of a long beach drenched in sunshine, of the evening sun on the sea, of sunlight through the tamarisk trees.
And yet, it was more than fourteen years since he had been back to Hendaye; arriving after dark the night before, he had caught only glimpses of this enchanting corner of the Basque region: a shadowy abyss full of sounds – the sea – a few lights glimmering through an even darker patch which he guessed was a tamarisk wood and then some other lights at the edge of the waves – the Casino – where only the fishermen’s boats used to sway in the past. But the sunlit paradise of his childhood remained unspoiled in his memory and was resurrected in his dreams, down to the tiniest detail, down to the particular scent and taste of the air.
As a child, Yves had spent his most wonderful holidays in Hendaye. There he had savoured long, golden days, as delicious as ripe fruit beneath a sun that to his amazed eyes seemed utterly new, as if it had just been created. Since that time the universe had gradually seemed to lose its bright colours; even the sun had grown dimmer. But the young man still had his vivid, charmed imagination and, in certain dreams, he managed to recapture those childhood impressions in all their original splendour. The mornings that followed such nights seemed tinged by a kind of delicious, enchanted sadness.
On this morning, Yves woke with a start at the stroke of eight, as he always did in Paris. He opened his eyes and started to leap out of bed; but through the slats in the louvred shutters, he saw a shard of light, like a golden arrow, gliding right to his bedside, and at the same time, he heard the soft buzzing that accompanies beautiful summer days in the country mingling with the cries of tennis players and those special, cheerful sounds – bells ringing, footsteps, foreign voices – which, in themselves, are enough to make you realise that you are in a hotel, a large establishment full of idle people without a care in the world.
So Yves went back to bed, smiled, stretched out, enjoying his every exquisite, lazy movement, as if he had rediscovered a sense of luxury.
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