This is a very good depiction of a range of French people of different origins firstly fleeing from the Nazis as they approach Paris, and later learning to live under their rule. The depictions of the compromises people go through and the guilt at feeling friendly towards individual German soldiers is well described, particularly remarkable considering the author being Jewish and therefore having an even stronger reason for opposing the invaders tooth and nail. The reproductions of the letters of the author's husband as he frantically tries to track her down after her arrest and before his own arrest and deportation to Auschwitz are very poignant. ( )

I was really interested in reading this book after learning about the author. Irene Nemirovsky was a Jew living in France during WWII. She & her husband were both killed in a concentration camp at Auschwitz. Her daughter came upon some notebooks of her mother's & discovered these novellas as well as some others. They were only discovered in the 1990s & published by her daughter. That alone should be enough to make anyone want to read these novellas! What an extraordinary find! ( )

Found this to be good story about german occupation of France ... to get a sense of the german soldiers as people rather than a collective army; the pettiness of many of the french characters; the youthful ambition but uselessness of some of boys; the conflicting emotions for many of the women balancing unloved husbands with gentle, artistic others ... but ultimately, it's incompleteness made it not great - however if the author survived to write the final chapter of her trilogy, think it could have been magnificent. ( )

Through a set of stories the author relates what it was like to endure the Nazi occupation of France. A different look at WWII. The manuscript was unfinished as Irene Nemirovsky was arrested and placed in a concentration camp.

It's kind of an out of body experience to read a French novel about German occupation in WWII that is so kind to the German soldiers. Written by a French person. A Jewish French person. Who died in the Holocaust. There is little to no mention of the Jewish persecution by the German army, and the German soldiers are portrayed as just naive young men, out for glory and doing their duty like any other soldier. It makes you wonder...I'm so used to seeing Nazi soldiers villified, how true is that? Were the everyday soldiers more good or evil than any other soldier? How aware were they of Hitler's real motives?You can tell the book wasn't finished, per se, but it's magnificant, haunting, thought provoking, and moreso because of the conditions under which it wasn't finished. ( )

Buying this book, you get two stories in one and both are well-worth reading. The main story is Nemirovsky´s unfinished novel about the German occupation of France, with her notes and plans. In itself, this is a gripping and captivating story that you don't want to put down. I was more taken by the story of the book, as this book was discovered forty years after the author´s deportation to Auschwitz, in a suitcase her daughter held on to during everything that happend to them, but did not open. It his mindblowing to think about.

In desperate situations, indeed in all situations, experience is an enfolding mix of things that are absurd, terrifying, funny, intriguing, compelling. How well Nemirovsky showed this mix in "Suite Francaise"! But then, situations so close to those in her own life will of course have the tone of authenticity. The wonder is that under terrible conditions she herself was able to see so much complexity.

This isn't just a work of historical fiction, this is a tragedy. The author's own tale is even more dramatic than that of her characters. Nemirovsky, of Jewish and Russian origin, wrote the two novellas of Suite Francaise while hiding with her family in the French countryside during World War II. She was then arrested, and a month later she was killed in Auschwitz. Her manuscripts were toted around by her very young daughters during the duration of the war, and were not published in France until a few years ago.

The novellas evoke what would have been current events for Nemirovsky. Storm in June follows several families of all social castes and attitudes as they flee Paris before the German invasion. The second novella, Dolce, focuses on the German occupation of a French village. The thing that struck me most was the author's fairness in dealing with these very real people. There is no propaganda here, or hatred against the Germans. If anything, her argument is that everyone is human, and that extraordinary circumstances bring out the worst in French and Germans alike. This is particularly moving considering how Nemirosky died.

The appendix and letters in the back detail the the author's writing method, her family history, and the desperate letters sent by her husband and publishers in trying to gain Nemirovsky's release. ( )

There’s something funny about animals in books. Some authors just mention random pets haphazardly, to be sure, but I’ve read a lot of books where the mention of the animal reoccurs and is symbolic of the main characters in some way, like Chanticleer and his two wives in the House of the Seven Gables. In Suite Française, there is the cat.

In the first part of Suite Française, Némirovsky describes the exodus of Parisians, all abandoning Paris in the wake of German air strikes of WWII. Several different groups of people are followed by the story. There’s the writer Corte and Florence, his mistress, the Michauds, the Péricands, and Charles Langelet. The cat belongs to the Péricands, an upper middle-class family. He is introduced almost as soon as we meet the Péricands as follows: “A cat held a little piece of bony fish tentatively between its sharp teeth. He was afraid to swallow it, but he couldn’t bring himself to spit it out either”. Immediately, we know that it’s not just about the cat; all of Paris is afraid to stay in the comforts of their homes, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to leave it either.

The adventures of the cat are followed. As Mme Péricand packs up her family – the baby, Jacqueline the little daughter, Hubert the clumsy teenage son, the rich, ailing, fussy father-in-law constantly threatening to leave his fortune to a charity that is most notable to Mme Péricand for not being herself and her husband – the cat is also remarked to be captured and stuffed into a travelling basket. While staying in makeshift lodging along the way to their place of refuge, the cat is noticed to have snuck away in the night, for some country fresh air and mice, by the little girl crying “Albert’s run away!” and “I want Albert! Find Albert for me! The Germans will take him! He’ll be bombed, stolen, killed! Albert! Albert! Albert!” It’s summarizes the entire outpouring of people from Paris with all the usual customs of civility completely abandoned and fear of the incoming invaders, doesn’t it? (Nope, no sarcasm. Seriously, it really does make you think of the panic of fleeing one’s home.)

Not to worry, just like the family being scuttled to and fro, the cat is fine and continued to be dragged along with his family; Némirovsky is very careful to give updates about the state of the cat. She has a later chapter devoted to Albert exploring the French village at night (but back in Jacqueline’s bed before morning, we are assured) and a line in the Péricands’ hasty departure from the village under air raid attacks which details that Jacqueline had managed to pack the cat, even as surprised as they had been, and towed him along in his basket.

This little attention to Albert the cat is part of why this book is so good! It covers great breadth in that it follows a great number of threads (just like the other book I love), but each with attention to detail and insightful observations, sometimes expressed through description of peripheral things. Like the cat.

The second part of the book, Dolce, is very aptly named. It is about a little French village, called Bussy, during the German occupation. A French woman falls gently and subtly in love with the German officer lodging in her absent husband’s house. The love story is told through events like shy evenings by the piano (the German, who is almost always referred to as just that “the German”, is a musician) and a passionate conversation as overheard by a little girl, often distracted and not catching every word. She’s pretty, her husband keeps a mistress in a separate household, and he is wide-eyed and handsome. “The officer smiled. ‘They think you’re Judith going to murder Holofernes in his tent.’” This is said as the pair walk along a street while on an errand to retrieve some items belonging to a family who had abandoned their house. It’s altogether ... beautifully written , subtle and lovely.

http://daysreading.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )

I was afraid of the hype on this one, but the fact that an unedited, unfinished book made it to the 1001 books to read before you die list made me check it out. I wish I had bought my own copy and not checked it out from the library. There were so many sentences I wanted to highlight. Some of the imagery gets a little heavy handed, but I kept reminding myself that Nemirovsky didn't get a chance to edit.
It is a book about the French occupation from the point of view of people from many social classes. The characters are so well done I wanted to know more about each. Although it doesn't end as abruptly as I thought it would, she didn't get to finish the last 2 sections so there are a lot of loose ends. I'm still reading the Appendix which has her notes of what she planned in the last 2 sections. ( )

A book I didn't want to end. ( )

Loved it. Loved her writing and her depictions of people good and bad. ( )

This novel has a really fascinating history and the longer I tried to figure out how to review it, the harder it got because my thoughts about the work itself are so closely tied to its history. How do you review a work that isn’t actually finished? Suite Francaise is only two parts of a sweeping novel that Nemirovsky had planned to be a five part, 1000 page epic. She was writing about WWII as it was happening, and died at Auschwitz before completing the remaining three parts. The appendix contains Nemirovsky’s notes detailing her plans for Suite Francaise so readers get an idea of how the two parts were to fit into the overall story, but as it is, it is a work in progress.

The first of the two books in the Suite is “Storm in June”, which recounts the experience of various families and couples fleeing Paris during the German invasion in June of 1940. Nemirovsky tells the story mainly from the perspective of the rich, self-absorbed upper classes, who are more concerned about saving their linens and family china than about the fact that life as they know it is ending. It makes for a striking contrast against the refugees they encounter who are forced to leave Paris with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and the ones who had to make the journey on foot, hiding in ditches to avoid the bombs. According to the appendix, this was deliberate, and it works; I really disliked most of the characters and wanted to give their heads a shake. The pace of the story is brisk, not too much description of scenery or too many lengthy meditations, which I felt was appropriate to the circumstances – people are living minute to minute, never knowing when or where the next bomb will hit or if they’ll make it to the next town.

The second story, “Dolce”, takes place a year later in a small country village under German occupation. This one is slower paced, more reflective, giving us a look at brief period of calm during the war. A few of the characters introduced in “Storm” appear again here, though only in passing. In this one, a young French woman, whose husband has been taken prisoner by the Germans, falls in love with the German officer living with her and her mother-in-law. I liked “Dolce” better than “Storm”, I think because the characters in this one were more likeable and there was some more depth to the story.

All in all, I think my expectations may have been too high going into this because I came away feeling kind of disappointed. And here is where it gets tough to review properly, because these stories were not meant to stand on their own so I feel like I’m not being fair. After reading the appendix and Nemirovsky’s notes, I can see where she was going with the Suite and I think it would have brilliant if she’d been able to complete it. In the context of the overall story that she wanted to tell, “Storm” and “Dolce” are a perfect set-up and very smartly done, so I’m basing my rating on that. I read that Nemirovsky’s plan for this Suite and the way that she’d structured it was inspired by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony...what a tragedy it is that she wasn’t able to finish it. ( )

I actually read the Kindle version of this on a borrowed Kindle. It was quite good, though not as compelling as I expected based on reviews. In fact, not what I expected, though really very good in a completely different way. I haven't ever heard anything at all about the ward from the perspective of France, and I'm still not quite sure I get the history part, the occupation, and armistice. But it was interesting to read about the war from a new perspective, from the perspective of citizens of an occupied country, very interesting how lives changed, how people made do, how people tolerated (and even occasionally enjoyed) the Germans who lived in their homes. Book focused on stories of several families. ( )

Ok, I've given up on this one for now. It was very slow moving, very lengthly, very descriptive, just not for me at this point in time.... ( )

I didn't finish it. Though a fascinating piece of history the book is very long and tiring. Things should have been edited. ( )

You can read my full review on my Jew Wishes website. http://jewwishes.wordpress.com/2007/0...

Irene Nemirovsky has given us a compelling masterpiece, written with insight into the human condition, social classes, mores, individual values and ethics, that take place during the occupation of France beginning in 1940.

In “Storm in June” we are given characters who flee Paris city life and comforts, for what they believe is the safer countryside. In reality it is a frantic situation, as city refugees try to cope with chaos, and country farmers and peasants try to cope with the frenzy thrust upon them. Included in this chaos are characters whose lives intertwine and connect. We are given the scope of their souls during this time of extreme turmoil. The upper class and the lower class, all come together, within the same situational confines, and we see who is really made of character, strength and stoicism, and who can weather the storm.

In “Dolce”, we are given a continuation of some of the characters from “Storm in June”, and given new characters, set in a farming village in the countryside. This novella is filled with humor and poignancy, as we watch peasants, farmers and Germans inhabit the same village, and how they manage to exist together within the confines of German Officers have been billeted into homes.

Nemirovsky is compared to Proust and Tolstoy, and several other classic authors, but for me, Nemirovsky is beyond compare, with her compelling and intense writing, her descriptives flowing from one word to another, into sentences, creating two extremely realized novellas. ( )

Irene Nemirovsky had written only two of the planned five parts of her novel about the invasion and occupation of France by Germany in World War 2 when she was arrested, deported and kllled by the Third Reich. Though her husband was also liquidated, her daughters survived the war, and one of them held onto this manuscript as a memento of her mother.

Though it's a tragedy that the novel was never completed, what remains is still a masterpiece, which bears comparison with that other great narrative of occupation and resistance, "War and Peace". Nemirovsky portrays the fall of Paris and the first year of the German occupation with clarity and yet also with compassion for her characters, who intersect and interact in unexpected ways. The quality of the characterisation and the writing are both exceptionally good. This novel deserves to go in the must-read category. ( )

Ever since picking up my first work by Nemirovsky last year, I've admired her talent for observing the human condition. There's something about her observation of people and their actions that suggests a balance between optimistic humanism and world weariness. In Suite Francaise, she trains her fine eye on the way that people react, and then adjust, to war, specifically Germany's invasion of France in WWII.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section begins as the news spreads through France that the army has been unable to stop the Germans. With the Blitz heading towards Paris, panic spreads, and people begin to flee to the countryside. Nemirovsky quickly introduces several people, including one family, and the preparations they make to leave. At first, the sheer number of characters made it a bit confusing, but as the story progressed, I got to know the characters better and became able to distinguish them.

As the Parisians flee, they often find themselves in pretty harrowing circumstances. The invasion has thrown things into disorder, and people who've led lives of privilege and prestige suddenly find the charmed existence that they enjoyed has suddenly disappeared. At first the Germans appear only as news on the radio, but then there are bombings and aerial strafing, followed by pitched battles. The story reflects the horror and confusion of war. As the first section ends, the government has fallen, the fighting has ended and people are in the process of putting their lives back together.

The second section begins in the countryside, specifically in one of the villages to which one of the Parisians had fled. The Germans have gone from being an invading army to an occupying one, and in the process have gone from being an amorphous threat to having a very human face. In fact, the presence of all the young men in a village which has seen its own boys killed or taken prisoner gives rise to a strange dynamic of affection and resentment. This section felt even stronger, as Nemirovsky probes all the fault lines, allowing for a much slower boil of conflicting emotions and allegiances.

Because Nemirovsky was sent to the death camps, she never finished the novel, so the second section of the novel ends somewhat abruptly. Though not part of the novel, I couldn't help but contrast Nemirovsky's eye for day-to-day humanity with the sheer inhuman evil of the Holocaust. I also couldn't help wondering how this chronicle of the war, with all its fine detail and observations, would have continued had she lived. ( )

What can I say? It is the best book I've read in a long time. I don't know why I like it so much. She manages to capture the ordinary everyday feelings of her subjects at a time of great upheaval. The translation I had also featured some Appendices - Appendix 1 containing handwritten notes on the situation in France and her plans for the rest of the novel taken from her notebooks. She writes 1 July 1942 - twelve days before she was captured - "my deepest conviction. What lives on: 1. Our humble day-to-day lives 2. Art 3. God". It feels so contemporary it is hard to imagine that it was written nearly seventy years ago. I can't wait to read more of her books. Even though the book is unfinished it doesn't feel like that to me so I urge you not to be put off by that fact. It's not as if it stops mid-sentence or anything. In fact I think its unfinished quality adds to the haunting quality of the book - all the characters wonder when the war will end. It is an extraordinary work of art written by someone who was able to step to one side and observe the extraordinary period in which she was living. ( )

This unfinished novel (it consists of only the first two of its planned five "movements") is a cinematic epic of the Fall of Paris in 1940 and the German occupation, written as these events were unfolding, and as Nemirovsky's own safety was growing increasingly uncertain. She writes as witness, social critic and indefatiguable storyteller, rejecting the larger, "historical" story for the daily lives of French people as they cope in their myriad venal, humorous, and sometimes unselfish ways with foreign occupation. It is certainly something of an ironic class study, and so is an interesting followup to reading Madame Bovary. Nemirovsky creates several handfuls of archetypal characters: farmers, middle-class city dwellers, urban and country bourgeoisie, rich people and artists (no Jews, interestingly; she removes herself from the story)—then allows their lives to intersect, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes profoundly. The story is told by a fully omniscient narrator, a device no longer much in fashion. This may make today's reader feel a bit "overmanaged": we go with the cat on a nocturnal escapade; we are told what the birds are thinking. There are no enigmas here, really, nothing to be worked out by the reader; Nemirovsky reveals everyone's pettiest thoughts and snarled motives, the class traits that drive each person's choices. The narrator's voice is subtly humorous, sprightly—even when describing horrors.

What makes this work so extraordinary, of course, is the appalling tragedy that befell Nemirovsky and her family. The appendices at the end of the Vintage International paperback edition are enormously affecting: Nemirovsky's chatty, straightforward notes for the book's completion; a raft of desperate letters between Nemirovsky's husband, friends and publishers as they try to find where the author has been taken by the Germans, and to intercede for her; and a short history of the book's coming to light, sixty years after Nemirovsky's death at Auschwitz.

While Nemirovsky, embattled and fearful herself, so steadily and determinedly held a mirror up to her adoptive country in its worst moments in history, even her fiction—that great medium of speculative thought—could not foresee the terrible turn the Occupation would take for her and millions of other innocent people. ( )

read 02/05/09

Suite Francaise is the partial story of France and its occupants when the Germans arrived during WW2. The story is unfinished as the author herself was sent to Auschwitz by the Germans. However the story that we are provided with, which is split into two parts, is amazing and draws you right in. From the Parisians fleeing the German invasion to the relationships between the French village members and the occupying German soldiers. ( )

Flicking through the appendices at the end of this novel adds to the sense of awe at what Irene Nemirovsky wrote and the terrible sense of sadness that her life was cut short when she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Conceived as her own 'War and Peace', she completed two sections of a planned five before her death. That these sections are stunning in their completion and bear comparison with Tolstoy's classic is one thing; that she must have written them virtually contemporaneous to the war going on around her is quite another. How did she manage to gain critical distance? And where does the confidence come from to conceive a five-part novel about a war when the war has not even finished? Nemirovsky had her other three sections vaguely mapped out, though. It seems she was able to place a novelists sense of narrative structure on great historical events yet to occur as well as on her own work. And while her notes fret at times that she might have set herself the task of chronicling an event that would be many decades in the making, had she lived the notes make it clear that she would have been able to fit her planned narrative to what came to pass.

The missing three sections are not the only remarkable absence in this work. There is also no mention of the persecution of the Jews. Instead, Nemirovsky, a Jewish woman well aware of the danger she faced, chose to focus on the minutiae of a cast of characters drawn in the first section from Paris and in the second from a single village in the heart of France. Initially the unlikable qualities of so many of these characters seems to be a problem. However, as the novel progresses it becomes clear that they have to be unlikeable. For Nemirovsky is critiquing the particular type of French society that was able so quickly to reconcile itself to the Nazi occupation. Her book is not particularly representative of all France, but in its cruel depiction of the middle and upper classes she shines a light on the people who had themselves made such efforts to define what it meant to be French. Though France is geographically so near and the war historically within the memory of many, the novel also enlightens the reader - or an English one certainly - on events that took place.

It's a brilliant book. It seems churlish to lament the fact that it was not completed - afterall it is only a book, worthless when compared to the millions senselessly slaughtered. But part of the process of reading it is to reflect on what is missing - and that includes all the war dead. ( )

Irene Nemirovsky completed two parts of a planned five. The first section, Storm in June, covers the panicked flight from Paris. Most of the people Nemirovsky describes here are concerned with saving their possessions and maintaining a comfortable existence, goals that require currying favour with the Nazi occupation government. The chaos of the flight contrasts with calmness and beauty of Nemirovsky's finely observed descriptions of daily life and the surroundings.

The second section, Dolce, is set in a village during the occupation. German officers are billeted on resentful bourgeois householders, all women. Village men are away in the resistance or are prisoners of war. The villagers, while greedy, narrow-minded and mean, are patriotic. Only the family from the chateau and some of the young working women collaborate with the Germans.

Nemirovsky is emotionally restrained in the portrayal of her characters. She describes with sympathy the growing friendship between an unhappy young wife and a German officer. She describes the breakdown of French society from a civilised, humanitarian perspective.

A quote from her notes:
"I must write something great and stop wondering whether there's any point. Have no illusions: this is not for now."

I think she achieved what she set out to do, leaving us with a gripping account of the occupation and many questions about the moral choices that ordinary French people were making.

I think the book deserves its acclaim partly because it is a record of the occupation written at the time by an author who tried to record the truth of what she was living through. I don't know if there is another. I'd give it 4 * for that alone. The fact that it's well-written gives it another *.

Perhaps some of the acclaim is due to the tragedy of Nemirovsky's death in Auschwitz and the excitement of discovering a book thought to have been lost, but that doesn't detract from its worth. Nemirovsky's impending death at the hands of the Nazis and their supporters was, after all, the reason why she had to write the book. ( )