Le Bal - Softcover

Nemirovsky, Irene

 
9780676979664: Le Bal
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0676979661 ISBN 13: 9780676979664
Verlag: Vintage, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

From the acclaimed author of Suite Française comes Némirovsky’s third novel, a masterpiece of French literature, available for the first time in Canada.

Le Bal is a penetrating and incisive book set in early twentieth century France. At its heart is the tension between mother and daughter. The nouveau-riche Kampfs, desperate to become members of the social elite, decide to throw a ball to launch themselves into high society. For selfish reasons Mrs. Kampf forbids her teenage daughter, Antoinette, to attend the ball and banishes her to the laundry room. In an unpremeditated fury of revolt and despair, Antoinette takes a swift and horrible revenge. A cruel, funny and tender examination of class differences, Le Bal describes the torments of childhood with rare accuracy.

Also included in this volume is Snow in Autumn, in which Némirovsky pays homage to Chekov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime, as well as the posthumous Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. The first French publication of Fire in the Blood, by the publishers who discovered and published Suite Française, is in March 2007.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Madame Kampf walked into the study and slammed the door behind her with such force that a gust of air made the crystal beads on the chandelier jingle with the pure, light sound of small bells. But Antoinette didn’t stop reading; she was bent so far forward over her desk that her hair brushed the pages of her book. For a moment, Madame Kampf watched her daughter without saying anything; then she went to stand in front of her, arms crossed over her chest.

‘You know, Antoinette, you could stop what you’re doing when you see your mother,’ she barked. ‘Is your bottom glued to that chair? What refined manners you have! Where’s Miss Betty?’

From the adjoining room came the sound of a sewing machine, punctuated by snatches of song, crooned in a youthful but rather poor voice: ‘What shall I do, what shall I do when you’ll be gone away . . .’

‘Miss Betty,’ Madame Kampf shouted, ‘come in here.’

‘Yes, Mrs Kampf,’ the young woman replied in English, slipping through the half-open door. She had rosy cheeks and soft, frightened eyes; her hair was gathered in a honey-coloured bun that sat low on her neck, framing her small round head.

‘I believe I hired you,’ Madame Kampf began harshly, ‘to look after and educate my daughter, and not so you could make yourself dresses. Does Antoinette not know she is meant to stand up when her mother comes into the room?’

‘Oh, Ann-toinette! How can you?’ said Miss Betty in a kind of sad twitter.

Antoinette was standing up now, balancing awkwardly on one leg. She was a tall, lacklustre girl of fourteen, with the pale face common to girls of her age — a face so thin and taut that it seems, to adults, like a round, featureless blotch. Dark circles were under her lowered eyelids, and her mouth was small and tight. The fourteen-year-old body . . . budding breasts that strain against the tight schoolgirl’s uniform, that are painful and embarrassing to her delicate, childlike body; big feet and long arms like sticks of French bread that end in red hands and ink-stained fingers (and which one day, who knows, might turn into the most beautiful arms in the world); a spindly neck; short, dull hair that is dry and fine . . .

‘Don’t you see, Antoinette, that your manners are driving me to despair? Sit down again. I’m going to come back in, and this time you will do me the honour of standing up immediately, understand?’

Madame Kampf took a few steps out of the room and once again opened the door. Antoinette stood up so slowly and with such obvious reluctance that her mother clenched her teeth.

‘Perhaps you can’t be bothered, is that it, Miss?’ she asked sharply, her voice threatening.

‘No, Mama,’ replied Antoinette quietly.

‘Well, then why have you got that look on your face?’

Antoinette attempted a smile, but with so little effort that it merely distorted her features into an unfortunate grimace. Sometimes she hated grown-ups so much that she could have killed them, mutilated them, or at least stamped her foot and shouted, ‘No! Just leave me alone!’ But her parents frightened her. Ever since she was a tiny child, she’d been afraid of her parents.

When Antoinette was small, her mother had often held her on her lap, cuddled her, and kissed her. But Antoinette had forgotten all that. Instead she remembered what it was like to hear the roar of an angry voice above her head: ‘You’re always under my feet, Antoinette . . .’; ‘Don’t tell me you’ve dirtied my dress with your filthy shoes again! Go and stand in the corner, do you hear me? That will teach you, you little idiot!’; and one day on a street corner — the day when, for the first time, she had wanted to die — a shout so loud, during one of their scenes, that passers-by had turned round to stare: ‘Do you want me to smack you? Do you?’ Deep in her heart she remembered how that slap burned her face. Right in the middle of the street! She had been eleven then, but big for her age. The passers-by, the grown-ups, she didn’t care about them . . . But some boys had been coming out of school, and they’d laughed when they’d seen her: ‘Oh you poor thing!’ Their sniggering had followed her as she walked, head down, along the dark autumn avenue, the street-lamps a blur through her tears. ‘Haven’t you finished snivelling yet? You’ve got no character! You must know I punish you for your own good! And I’m warning you . . . You’d better not annoy me again, or else.’ People were horrible . . . And, even now, she was hounded from morning to night, as if deliberately to torment her, torture her, humiliate her: ‘Look at how you’re holding your fork!’ (in front of the servants, for God’s sake); and ‘Stand up straight. Or at least try not to look like a hunchback.’ She was fourteen years old, a young lady — and, in her dreams, a woman who was beautiful, adored . . . She turned men’s heads. They caressed her the way Andrea Sperelli caressed Elena and Maria in D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere, the way Julien de Suberceaux caressed Maud de Rouvre. Love . . . She trembled at the thought of it.

‘And if you think that I’m paying an English governess so you can have manners like that, you are very much mistaken, young lady!’

Madame Kampf lowered her voice.

‘You keep forgetting that we’re rich now, Antoinette,’ she said, pushing back a lock of hair that had fallen on to her daughter’s face.

She turned to the Englishwoman.

‘I have a lot of errands for you to run this week, Miss Betty. I’m holding a ball on the fifteenth . . .’

‘A ball,’ murmured Antoinette, her eyes opening wide.

‘Yes,’ said Madame Kampf, smiling, ‘a ball . . .’

She looked at Antoinette with pride, then frowned, indicating the Englishwoman with a slight twitch of the eyebrow.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve been talking, have you?’

‘No, Mama, no,’ Antoinette quickly replied.

She knew all too well her mother’s constant worry. At first — two years ago now, in 1926, when they’d left the Rue Favart after her father had made a killing on the Stock Market (first on the devaluation of the franc and then of the pound) and they’d become rich — Antoinette had been called into her parents’ bedroom every morning. Her mother would be lying in bed polishing her nails; in the adjoining dressing room, her father, a dry little Jew with fiery eyes, would be shaving, washing, and getting dressed, all with the same breakneck speed that characterised his every action and which, in the past, had earned him the nickname ‘Feuer’ amongst the German Jews, his friends at the Stock Market. For years Alfred Kampf had haunted the great steps of the Stock Market without getting anywhere. Antoinette knew that he used to be an employee of the Banque de Paris and, long before that, a doorman at the bank, wearing a blue uniform. Shortly before Antoinette was born, he’d married his mistress, Mademoiselle Rosine, the manager’s secretary. For eleven years they had lived in a small, dingy apartment behind the Opéra Comique. Antoinette remembered how the maid would crash about in the kitchen washing the dishes while she sat at the dining-room table doing her homework, Madame Kampf reading novels beside her, leaning forward to catch the light from the large gas-lamp with the round frosted glass shade that hung above them. Now...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0676979661
ISBN 13 
9780676979664
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780099493976: Le Bal: And: Snow in Autumn

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0099493977 ISBN 13:  9780099493976
Verlag: Vintage, 2007
Softcover