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Suite française by Irène Némirosky
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping « suite, » collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, « Storm in June, » chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, « Dolce, » set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe « daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides. » This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas. (Apr. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post
This extraordinary work of fiction about the German occupation of France is embedded in a real story as gripping and complex as the invented one. Composed in 1941-42 by an accomplished writer who had published several well-received novels, Suite Française, her last work, was written under the tremendous pressure of a constant danger that was to catch up with her and kill her before she had finished.
Irène Némirovsky was a Jewish, Russian immigrant from a wealthy family who had fled the Bolsheviks as a teenager. She spent her adult life in France, wrote in French but preserved the detachment and cool distance of the outsider. She and her husband were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was gassed upon arrival and she died in the infirmary at the age of 39. Her manuscript, in minuscule and barely readable handwriting, was preserved by her daughters, who, ignorant of the fact that these notebooks contained a full-fledged masterpiece, left it unread until 60 years later. Once published, with an appendix that illuminates the circumstances of its origin and the author’s plan for its completion, it quickly became a bestseller in France. It is hard to imagine a reader who will not be wholly engrossed and moved by this book.
Némirovsky’s plan consisted of five parts. She completed only the first two before she was murdered. Yet they are not fragmentary; they read like polished novellas. The first, « Storm in June, » gives us a cross section of the population during the initial exodus from the capital, when a battle for Paris was expected and people fled helter-skelter south, so that the roads were clogged with refugees of all classes. Némirovsky shows how much caste and money continued to matter, how the nation was not united in the face of danger and a common enemy. In her account, the well-to-do continue to be especially egotistical and petty. And yet a deep, unsentimental sympathy pervades this panorama. Looking up to the sky at enemy planes overhead, the refugees who have to sleep on the street or in their cars « lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them. » I can’t think of a more chilling and concise image to convey the helplessness of civilians in an air raid.
Not being French herself but steeped in French culture may have made it easier for Némirovsky to achieve her penetrating insights with Flaubertian objectivity. She gives us startling, steely etched sketches of both collaboration and resistance among people motivated by personal loyalties and grievances that date from before the war.
The second part, « Dolce » (the title — Italian for « sweet » — derives from Némirovsky’s plan to give the work a musical structure), covers the occupation by the Germans of a small village, from the so-called armistice in June 1940 to the Soviet Union’s entry into the war a year later. One can forget that there was a period after the defeat of France when World War II could be seen simply as a war between Germany and Britain. The villagers yearn for peace, and many are indifferent as to who wins, England or Germany, as long as their own men come home. Némirovsky is superb in describing how fraternization comes about, including French girls and women giving in to the attractions of the handsome German occupants — there are no other men around, most of the French men having been taken prisoner. But the unnatural situation also breeds fierce feelings of resentment and humiliation. Némirovsky embodies this conflict in the story of a woman who falls in love with a German officer and at the same time hides a villager wanted for the murder of another German — a murder motivated partly by patriotic hatred and partly by marital jealousy.
One puzzling omission from the spectrum of conquered and cowering French society is the Jews — the one group that was more endangered than any other, as Némirovsky knew only too well. Perhaps she wanted to save the fate of the Jews for the next part, which was to be entitled « Captivity. » Even so, when one thinks of the threat the Jewish population endured even at this early stage of persecution, one feels the significant gap here.
Still, this is an incomparable book, in some ways sui generis. While diaries give us a day-to-day record, their very inclusiveness can lead to tedium; memoirs, on the other hand, written at a later date, search for highlights and illuminate the past from the vantage point of the present. In Némirovsky’s Suite Française we have the perfect mixture: a gifted novelist’s account of a foreign occupation, written while it was taking place, with history and imagination jointly evoking a bitter time, correcting and enriching our memory.
Reviewed by Ruth Kluger
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
29 juillet 2010 à 22:19
Exquisitely written by an interesting Russian/French/Jewish author. Keenly oserved and finely nuanced work. I imagine it would have deep resonance with French readers, because of the finely drawn culture of daily life in the French villages. But (and I am truly sorry to say that for me, it felt lifeless and it was a struggle to get to the end. For me the greatest puzzle was the Father Phillipe chapter. Descriptions of the boys, subhuman, obedient (to what?), then the violence at the chateau, and the killing. What parallels was she drawing, to whom, what? That there are soulless people who will band together against anyone who will try to stop their mindless violence? Yes, but why select these « orphans » in order to make that point?
7 novembre 2010 à 22:29
I thank the librians from both Mount Prospect and Sevres for supporting this Book Crossing.
I loved the adult reader book choices.
This truly is as success!