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.
