Somber ... This austere, tamped-down novel is frustratingly committed to silence. Passions still smolder below the surface, but there is not enough oxygen to let them flame into life.
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s fourth novel, The Old Fire, begins with Agathe, a New York-based screenwriter, arriving in rural Périgord, France, during a rainstorm ... Agathe has flown to France to empty and sell her childhood home. The trip brings her back into the orbit of her mute younger sister ... Dusapin’s spare, restrained style lends itself well to the emotional static that snaps between the estranged adult siblings, even with the added challenge that Véra communicates only through gestures, by scribbling on pieces of paper or by tapping words into her phone ... As in Dusapin’s acclaimed 2021 novel, the National Book Award-winning Winter in Sokcho, her descriptions of physical places in The Old Fire are vivid and intriguing ... Agathe’s emotional remove doesn’t dissolve much over the course of the novel. Given her avoidance of deep feelings, the reader doesn’t feel much either. At one point, she states that she’d like to know what 'my sister dreams of.' She never asks, and Dusapin’s stylish but withholding novel leaves us wondering as well.
A novel that contends wholeheartedly with silence, which is perhaps why it reads almost like a ghost story ... Like Dusapin’s previous books, the prose here is spare, with few descriptors and little extraneous detail ... Words are deployed strategically, but few sentences are beautiful in themselves. Rather, the spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic.
The Old Fire is a masterpiece of restraint. A book that deals in sensitive subjects, but eschews void-gazing and bloodletting to craft a truly unique approach to grief and trauma, even in the moments when actual blood is involved.
Vera’s aphasia and their parents’ separation could use more explanation, and Dusapin’s focus on the sisters makes the narrative a bit claustrophobic. Nevertheless, this is a soulful look, heavy with regret, at the ties we cannot break no matter how hard we try.
The book ends as quietly as it begins ... All the big drama happened in the past, but it still informs everything in this intriguing and surprising book.
Minimalist, atmospheric ... Dusapin’s quick, mesmeric read asks an old and universal question about how we maintain difficult relationships with the people we love. How do we manage to break through the thick, penetrating silences that hold us captive and complacent?
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.
