“The Old Fire” by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, won a National Book Award, among others. It was set in South Korea, while her next two novels were respectively set in Japan and Russia. Of Franco-Swiss and Korean heritage, Dusapin has crafted her fourth and most recent novel, The Old Fire, as a homecoming of sorts: she’s turned to her birthplace in the Dordogne. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, who had worked with Dusapin on her previous three books, has communicated Dusapin’s latest with this tender, melancholic and evocative translation. 

The story itself is mapped out from the very beginning. Agathe is a thirty year old French woman who has lived in the United States for the past fifteen years after moving there alone for high school. When the story opens, she has returned from New York to help clear out her late father’s house in the Dordogne. He had passed away five years earlier and this is the first time Agathe has been back to the family home. The house is as much of a character in this story as the humans.

The building looks tired, the ivy-covered roof sagging above the brickwork, like a weary giant gasping for breath. There’s a car parked under the hazelnut tree. Bracken forces its way between the cracks in the front steps. Through the window, I can see a light inside.

The house will soon be torn down; Agathe and her younger sister Véra cannot afford to update it to the current safety codes, so they plan to throw away or donate their father’s belongings. The land on which their house stands will be turned into camping grounds and some of the stones from the house will go to their neighbor Octave, the heir to the chateau next door aptly named Le Pigeon Froid. On the chateau’s grounds is a pigeonnier, a structure where thousands of pigeons once roosted. As Agathe tells Octave:

It was a thing of beauty to behold. Pigeons were a rare and highly prized species. They carried messages, their meat could be eaten and even their droppings were collected to fertilise the soil. So soft and gleaming were their feathers, the trees themselves grew branches for them to nest in. A pigeon’s life was brief and when one died another would die of grief soon afterwards. But the will to live is strong and the species found a way to survive.

The humans in this story have also found ways to survive. Agathe and Véra  were abandoned by their mother when they were still in primary school. Also at some point during their childhood—the sisters are three years apart—Véra stopped speaking. She can hear fine, but became mute and communicates with hand gestures and typing messages on her phone. It’s perhaps not the easiest of relationships: “Octave says it couldn’t have been easy for Véra, growing up with a sister as brilliant as me.”The story only takes place over a week—the time it takes to clear out the house—and it’s long enough for Agathe to think back to the difficulties of her childhood and that of Vera as well as her current concerns about her relationship with her long-term boyfriend Irvin.Yet the trip has its good points and the beauty of the area is not lost on Agathe.

A lunar landscape comes into view. Sources of heat are lit up, the stable, the chateau, forest, their outlines wavering, as if the whole scene might explode at any moment. I become aware of how high up we are here in the pigeonnier, the castle walls built into the rock. The pond in the background is black, like the sky, it must be freezing cold.

When the house is cleared, Agathe needs to return home to New York. She works as a screenwriter and is in the process of adapting Georges Perec’s novel, War the Memory of Childhood, to the screen. With this solid novel, Dusapin has also come home.