In Flesh and Blood, the Demestres have a weekly family dinner every Sunday. These dinners are held at the widowed matriarch’s house, and attended by her three grown sons; Albert, Augustin, and Alain, their spouses; Sabine, Claire, and Alix, and her divorced daughter, Mariette. For their mother, Anna, these family dinners are a way to meet her children, especially her sons whom she believes have been taken away from her by her daughters-in-law. But to her children, who do not get along that well, these dinners are a cause of frustration! So when Anna comes down with a fever and seems to be on the brink of death, her children can’t escape having to spend time with each other while they wait for their mother to recover.
I despised all the Demesters in the story except for the daughters-in-law. In Anna’s eyes, the spouses of her sons are outsiders, and she thinks her daughters-in-law “had eroded the bond between the sons and their mother so cleverly and effectively, so worn it down, that it hardly existed any longer…. But within the affectionately tolerant way they looked at her, there remained a repressed animosity and a longing for revenge.” It was hard for me to believe that Anna’s daughters-in-law harbored any malice towards her, given that they were the ones who looked after Anna when she fell sick. But that’s not the way their (ungrateful, I might add) husbands see it. During their mother’s illness they “come to realize” that they are “alone” in their marriages and they can only count on their “flesh and blood”; their siblings. I found it laughable given that their spouses had stayed with them through thick and thin and loved them even when Albert had destroyed most of Sabine’s inheritance on bad business deals, and Alain had been cheating on Alix for eight years!
Anyway in the end things revert back to the way they were between the siblings the moment Anna is out of the woods. In Flesh and Blood, Némirovsky’s usual knack for expressing human behavior is evident even though it is not one of my favorite Némirovsky’s.
Advertisements Share this:
