Well, I do not know if the novel I read was part of these ones. I read it in Italian, under the title Due, its original title being Deux. It was published in 1939 and advertised as the first "love" novel by Irene Nemirovsky. But GoodReads does not have any "Deux" by itself, and I want to write about this book. So here I am.
I have been only slightly aware of the frenzy surrounding the discovery of Nemirovsky's wartime unfinished work, Suite francaise, and I sort of fell into Deux because I received it as a present. And, well, also because in the Italian edition it is an absolutely marvelous object, published by Adelphi, the cover a faded pink (rosa antico) that stands out and warms your hands.
But then it is the story that takes over, that overwhelms. Reading it feels like an indulgence, a pause, a lightning from a different epoch.
"Two" is really about three, or four, couples, and about youth passions, and about what passion becomes if you follow these couples long enough along their inevitably prosaic lives. No, it's not very optimistic. But what a jewel, Quel regal. By the time I got to the penultimate chapter, the novel had come full circle. The protagonists' children play at home, and we witness in their childish play the first stirrings of the same passion, and restlessness, that captured the reader at the beginning, when those emotions belonged to their now remote, and emotionally frozen, parents. There is something so irrevocable and yet so light in the route she takes in telling us these Parisians' lives, that I was left in complete awe.