#RivetingReviews: West Camel reviews THE OLD FIRE by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

There is something of the fairy tale about this story of two ill-sorted sisters returning to their family home to clear it after their father’s death: the house itself sits deep in a French forest; a nearby pond is said not to reflect the moon; the chateau that looms over it belongs to a potential Prince Charming figure; and since their father’s death, the narrator, Agathe, and her sister, Véra, are now orphans. Even Véra’s aphasia, when paired with Agathe’s success as a screenwriter who focuses on dialogue, has a mythic duality.

Yet this is not Angela Carter territory – the novel sits firmly within the real world: the sisters take the contents of the house to the local dump; Véra communicates with Agathe via text message; and while the forest is populated with hunters, their most sinister threat is a mild irritation that the sisters aren’t wearing hi-vis jackets during what is the hunting season.

The way Dusapin plays with this natural-supernatural dynamic is probably best exemplified by the tale Agathe relates about the lives of the pigeons who once inhabited the chateau’s pigeonnier tower: When two pigeons came together in love, their amorous caresses were so ardent, the birds would catch fire. The pigeons died in the blaze, but from the embers of their bones would emerge a chick, whose plumage took on the colour of the ashes: the shimmering blue-grey hues we now see on pigeons are the glimmer of those flames. When Agathe reveals that her father, a tourist guide, created the tale, Octave is surprised: He’d always considered my father to be a model of scientific rigour. Her father, it seems, combined science with the supernatural as he explained to his daughters the world around them.

Indeed, this ‘old fire’ tale informs many aspects of this beautiful and almost cryptic novel, not least the fact that Agathe is experiencing another loss on top of that of her father: she has recently gone through a miscarriage. She speaks of this to no one – in an interesting parallel to Véra’s aphasia. We’re never given the full picture of Agathe’s relationship and the impact the loss of her pregnancy is having on it. Similarly, it never becomes clear why Véra has remained non-verbal since the age of six. So while the house is finally emptied, and the sisters return to their regular lives, the novel does not provide any tidy conclusion. Instead we’re left with something of an intriguing puzzle, each element of which is rich with meaning and symbolism – very much like a fairy tale, if without the ending.

Over the course of the four novels she has so far published, Dusapin has been honing her technique of packing more and more into every chapter, paragraph, phrase and word – every Barthesian parole; just as Aneesa Abbas Higgins has become evermore skilful in rendering Dusapin’s words in English. The Old Fire – so slim, so brief, so fleeting – is a major piece of work that deserves repeated rereading to unpack each of its mythic items.

Reviewed by West Camel

THE OLD FIRE

Written by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Published by Daunt Books Originals (2026)

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West Camel is a writer, reviewer and editor. He edited Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2015 and is currently working for Orenda Books. He has written two novels, Attend and Fall. He is the editor of TheRiveter magazine and the #RivetingReviews for the European Literature Network.

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