The Old Fire (Release date 1/13/2026)

By Elisa Shua Dusapin

Simon & Schuster, 192 pages.

★★★★

 

The Old Fire comes out in a few weeks. I really liked this work by award-winning Swiss/French author Elisa Shua Dusapin, but unless I miss my guess it is a work that will prove polarizing.

 

It is set in the French countryside and involves two sisters who have had minimal contact in more than a decade. Agathe is now 30 and left home at 15 to study and ultimately live in New York where she now writes dialogue for adapted scripts. When she left, her younger sister Véra had stopped talking. It is not entirely clear is she has aphasia or has voluntarily chosen to be mute. I suspect Dusapin wanted this to be ambiguous because the very crux of The Old Fire is about what is said and what is unsaid, explained and unexplained, and what should be saved and what should be discarded.

 

Agathe returns to France in the autumn to help Véra clear out their father’s home several years after his actual death. The book’s title, like many things in it, carries several potential meanings, but the most immediate is that their childhood home sat on the edge of a chateau-like estate in the Périgord that was ravaged by fire. By happenstance, I visited the Périgord just two months ago. It is a beautiful part of France with a storied past but its economy now relies heavily on tourism, wine, and agricultural products, the latter two of which are weather-dependent. There are many chateaux, all of which are enormously expensive to maintain. Neither Agathe nor Véra have the money it would take to restore their home, though one of the many disagreements among the sisters is that Véra loves nature and would stay if she could, whereas Agathe is urbanized and plans to leave as soon as she can, even though her life in New York has been anything other than a bed of roses.

 

The book opens with Agathe’s observation that her childhood home and immediate surroundings look at once familiar, but are a tatterdemalion version of what she remembers. In any event, the die has been cast. The house has been sold and will be demolished as the value of land exceeds that of renovating the building. Agathe’s desire not to linger is bolstered by the fact that everything they want must be taken away within nine days before the bulldozers level everything. Agathe wants nothing from the house, but Véra is bent on saving way too many things.

 

It is a classic push-pull between a pragmatist and a sentimentalist. Try resolving that dispute via gestures, hastily scribbled notes, and messages Véra types on her phone. In essence, Agathe and Véra are sorting, but not sorting out. Among the things they can’t sort out are why their mother ran off when they were both girls, why Agathe promised to protect her sister but then abandoned her, and what will happen to Véra in nine days, though the latter bothers Agathe more than it does Véra. In the hands of a less confident and competent author, The Old Fire would have a Hallmark ending in which all disagreements melt in the face of an unearthed mutual love. Without resorting to spoilers, I will simply note that Dusapin seldom resorts to sentimentalism. Some “old fires” can’t be rekindled. Not to mention that Véra’s brain works better than Agathe thinks.

 

Dusapin has written an unusual work of fiction that has very little plot, a surfeit of action, no primary narrator, and contains more internalized thought than dialogue. It is a quiet book that is often sad, but is also a study in resiliency (or stubbornness–take your pick). Courtesy of her translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins, the book’s prose is clear and unadorned, yet evocative and poetic. It leaves us with questions such as those I’ve raised, plus one of how two people can see the same things differently. Some early readers have yearned for a longer book to resolve numerous issues; at 192 pages, The Old Fire is either a short novel or a long novella. In my mind, though, concision was a virtue. What can be said when there’s nothing left to say?

 

A trigger warning: One of the characters is asleep and awakes to find she is being penetrated. She finds this semi-romantic. Ouch! Romance or rape?

 

Rob Weir   

 

 

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book.