Haunted by Silence

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel ‘The Old Fire,’ newly translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, two sisters must find a way to communicate without words.

By Grace LindenJanuary 20, 2026

• Fiction

SILENCE IS ONE of the more difficult things to write since its existence is inherently opposed to words. There is the quiet of nonspeech but also quiet thoughts, feelings, the absolute stillness of snow. Some novels, especially fragmentary ones, cosplay at this with their trim sentences and proliferation of blank space, but these books tend to conflate sparseness with silence.

Then there is Elisa Shua Dusapin’s newly translated The Old Fire, a novel that contends wholeheartedly with silence, which is perhaps why it reads almost like a ghost story. Certainly, it has all the components of one: an old dilapidated house, terrible smells, nebulous relationships. Agathe, our narrator, grew up with her sister outside of Périgueux, in the Dordogne region of France. After years of living in New York, she has returned to help her sister Véra clear out their childhood home following the death of their father. The house is filled with worm-eaten furniture, old bottles of spirits, an unending serpentine trail of ants. In the surrounding woods, hunters seek out wild boar.

This run-down house has long been haunted by ghosts. Agathe and Véra’s mother left the family many years earlier. Even before her departure, the parents’ relationship cast a pall over everything. Agathe remembers:

They usually quarreled in their bedroom. Sometimes they’d go for days without speaking at all. Véra and I would make ourselves scarce. We weren’t trying to avoid them, but on the days when they weren’t speaking, if one of us happened to catch another’s eye, we’d all four turn our gaze quietly inward.

And Véra hasn’t uttered a word aloud since she was six. To communicate, she writes out messages on her phone. Rarely in contact, Agathe remains unnerved by her sister’s silence: “Since my return, she’s taken to looking at me and smiling every time our paths cross. To get my attention. I pretend I haven’t seen. I never know what to say.”

First published in French in 2023, The Old Fire was translated into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, who has worked with Dusapin since the English publication of her first novel, Winter in Sokcho (2016), in 2021. Like Dusapin’s previous books, the prose here is spare, with few descriptors and little extraneous detail. As with any translation, there are slight differences between the French and English texts. When Agathe first arrives at the house, she says hello as Véra opens the door. In the French version, we don’t know who says hello first or when. But translating is a thorny process. It is not a one-for-one replication but rather a conversion of sorts, in which a culture, a people, must be borne alongside the words themselves.

Higgins effortlessly captures Dusapin’s ephemeral prose. Words are deployed strategically, but few sentences are beautiful in themselves. Rather, the spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic. At one point, Agathe looks down at her hands: “I could turn into a statue too. If I’m envious I’ll be turned to stone, I’ll be like a block of ice. But if it’s hot, I’ll melt. I need it to be cold so I can feel stronger, so I can stand upright.”

Reading The Old Fire in English is fitting in a way since much of the novel is concerned with translation and linguistic complexity. Véra’s inability (or refusal) to talk places her at a remove from the world. Agathe, who speaks both French and English, seems to exist within her own linguistic bubble. Her life in New York, where she works as a screenwriter, is suffering its own communication breach as she is unable to respond to her partner Irvin following a lost pregnancy. For her job, Agathe turns text into images, a process that is itself a form of translation. Her current project concerns a reimagining of Georges Perec’s semi-autobiographical 1975 novel W ou le souvenir d’enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood), another act of interpretation.

The understanding (and misunderstanding) of language is central to all Dusapin’s novels. In Winter in Sokcho and The Pachinko Parlor (2018), characters communicate through drawing, the preparation of meals, and gestures. Dusapin, who grew up in France, South Korea, and Switzerland, was raised speaking Korean and French but later lost the former. “I’ve always felt that it’s not really my prerogative to write in French, that I ought to have been able to write in Korean, and although I write only in French my characters all speak a language other than French,” she explained in an interview with TANK. “I’m always translating my own words in my head. So, there’s a tension in my relationship as a writer to the French language. I don’t feel completely at ease in my own native language.”

The character most ill at ease in The Old Fire is Agathe, who seemingly cannot reconcile Véra the mute with the fulfilled and vivacious figure she finds still living in the family home. Nor can Agathe reconcile her own place in the world with her own family. For someone so obsessed with linguistic precision, who “weigh[s] up synonyms” and debates “the most subtle of nuances and meanings,” Agathe exists within a cage of her own making, fenced off from others and the many untold ways that communication occurs without speech.

Toward the end of the novel, Agathe, Véra, their friend and neighbor Octave, and Swann, his quasi-daughter, explore one of the Dordogne’s famous caves. The underground tunnels and grottoes culminate in what is known as the Candle Room, where the visitors find stalactites and stalagmites in icy, beguiling forms. Then, the door opens and the group emerges into the dazzling sunlight. Except that Véra is not there:

I find her in the Candle Room. Silhouetted, in profile, head turned up toward the ceiling, lost in thought. […] She signals to me that she’ll be right behind me. I walk slowly back, listening for her footsteps behind me. Suddenly I turn round. She’s standing, brushing a piece of rock lightly with her fingers.

In Plato’s famous allegory, the cave symbolizes ignorance while the sunlight outside represents knowledge and comprehension. Certainly, this holds true for Agathe, who views the cave as yet another silent place. But an absence of sound doesn’t equate to an actual lack, and so much of communication occurs beyond the bounds of spoken language. Forced to rely on other means of representing herself, Véra has come to understand this completely. Her way of being, although running against the norm, suggests that wisdom can be found within the cave as well, that darkness is not a shroud but a means to access another mode for seeing, one that Agathe might want to embrace.

One earlier evening, while hiding from a storm, Octave and Agathe peer through his thermal-imaging camera, which illuminates sources of heat, be they people, animals, or a stable. “You see that? How bright people are?” he says. “You look like you’re on fire.”