From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a novel about ambition and greed set against the fabulously wealthy French aristocracy of the 1920s.
A starving young immigrant doctor of Italian and Greek descent, Dario Asfar struggles to establish his practice, and is desperate to provide for his wife and newborn son. When the vulgar, self-indulgent French aristocrat Philippe Wardes dismisses his personal physician's advice to abstain from alcohol and gambling, he turns to Dr. Asfar for a second opinion. Understanding the opportunity before him, Dario obliges Wardes, and others like him, knowing well that the rich want to eat of the forbidden fruit without paying for the sin. At first Dario's plan is just for survival, but soon he begins to enjoy increasing rewards by selling himself as a master of souls who can miraculously cure restless minds, and in so doing sheds light on the lies we tell ourselves in the name of family and love.Autorentext
Irene Némirovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1903 into a wealthy Jewish family. From there they moved to St. Peters-burg, Russia where she continued a life of privilege until the Bolshevik Revolution caused the family to emigrate to Fin-land, then to Sweden, and finally to France in 1919 where she immersed herself in the company of thinkers, artists, musi-cians and cultural elites as a part of the Parisian literati of her time.
Sixty-two years after her death, in 2004, Irene Némirovsky's never-before-published Suite Française, a novel of France during the German Occupation, received the prestigious Prix Renaudot, and brought international acclaim to this gifted writer whose life was tragically lost in the Holocaust. She passed from typhus in 1942 in the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind two young daughters and an enduring legacy in literature.
Klappentext
A story set in 1920s France, about an Italian immigrant, a medical doctor fully licensed to practice, who is crushed by anti-immigrant discrimination and resorts to corrupting his soul in order to survive.
France, 1920. A starving young doctor, Dario Asfar, is desperate for money to provide food and lodgings for his wife and their newborn son. As an immigrant to France with an Italian and Greek background, he is mistrusted - even though he has French qualifications to practice medicine and has lived in country for fifteen years. He implores his Russian landlady and money-lender to help him. At first, she refuses, then agrees, on the condition that he perform a secret medical procedure on her daughter-in-law who she believes is ruining her son's life. The doctor agrees, however, his idealism plunges "into the hostile world of Western racism, so that he reemerges a cynical and corrupt creature, and a reluctant crook, determined to acquire honor”through any means necessary