THE OLD FIRE, by Elisa Shua Dusapin; translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
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. Alone in a rental van, she misses the highway exit to her childhood hamlet. She’s unable to see the sign with all the rain “hammering down on the hood.”
This atmospheric scene is characteristic of Dusapin’s fictional worlds, peopled with well-educated, multilingual protagonists skilled at traveling among countries. Dusapin was born in the Périgord region and grew up moving between France, Korea and Switzerland, where she now lives part time when she’s not residing in Amman, Jordan.
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, Véra, whom she hasn’t seen in 15 years. The friction between the sisters provides the novel’s subtle heat. 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.
The sisters’ dissonant modes of communication, one speaking aloud and one writing, give new texture to the familiar premise of adult siblings clearing out a family home, although the brevity of the novel’s scenes occasionally limits their potential. After hauling all the furniture out of the house to the town dump, Agathe sweeps the bare upper floor and repeats a mantra to herself: “I don’t owe you anything, Papa; I love you, Véra and I don’t owe you anything; I love you both, I owe you nothing.” Her concept of love, why it is the transactional notion of “owing” that she chooses to repeat to herself, remains unexplored.
In another quick scene, Véra asks Agathe: “If I wasn’t your sister, would you be friends with me?” Véra’s question arrives as a message written in charcoal pencil on the living room floor, and they both know the honest answer, which Agathe admits. It’s an intriguing moment of sibling truth and had Dusapin continued it a little longer, it might have led to something denser, of greater emotional weight. Instead, the unease evaporates after a few sentences and the sisters randomly begin to dance, with Agathe pressing down on her sister’s hips, and casting her off into a jump. It’s not clear why, after this painful exchange, Véra is inclined to perform a playful dance for a sister who hasn’t come to see her in more than a decade.
In a more resonant, extended scene, Agathe steps over Véra’s clothes on the bathroom floor and starts addressing Véra in her thoughts, responding to her sister’s accusation that she is too distant. “I don’t know what to tell you about myself,” she says to Véra in her head as she undresses and steps into the shower. Dusapin deftly slows the moment down here, to convey Agathe’s increasing instinct for silence alongside her sister’s, as she notes the scum and tangles of hair in the drain of their lone working shower.
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. Her superb translator, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, recreates Dusapin’s concise observations with lyrical choices in English, evoking, for example, bread “shriveled on the table” and a tarpaulin that “slaps against the scaffolding.”
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.
THE OLD FIRE | By Elisa Shua Dusapin | Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins | Summit | 175 pp. | $27
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