Master of Souls
Description
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
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Irène 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, Irène 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.
