Suite Française

Beautiful and heart-breaking, Suite Francaise demands a lot of its reader. Not because the novel—two linked novellas, really—is a very difficult work, nor because the prose is obscure, but because Némirovsky writes with such a clear-eyed, textured understanding and appreciation for the events unfolding around her in France in the opening years of the Second World War. There are disturbing incidents, but even more than that incidents which seem to go against the grain of what we think we know about WWII—what we imagine it must have been like to live under an occupying regime—and Némirovsky sketches out her characters with a very fine brush indeed.

It's sadly an unfinished work, as the author was murdered in a Nazi concentration show more camp in 1942—the appendices provide some of her plans for the rest of the novel, as well as some heart-breaking letters for her husband written while he was searching for her after her arrest—and I think if Némirovsky had had the chance to finish the manuscript and to revise it, it would truly have been a masterpiece. Suite Francaise is still a very fine work as it stands—and though always unfinished, its prose has been given added power and poignancy by that very fact. show less

Bonjour Tristesse

This unfinished work contain two of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin who converted to Catholicism before WWII.

Unfinished because of Némirovsky was murdered by then Nazis in Auschwitz in 1942. Her daughter typed up the two novels from handwritten manuscripts and notes. It has since been translated into English and other languages.Obviously unfinished, Némirovsky’s light stil shines through.

This is a gem of a book. The first novel, “Storm in June” describes the flight of Parisians when Germany invaded in 1940. Scenes are reminiscent of the refugees in Prophet Song in that the refugees are white Europeans. However the imagery here is lighter, show more understated, concentrating on groups of people, and highlighting to class differences in the fleeing Parisians.

Some were wealthy, with family connections outside Paris. These had planned ahead, or felt comfortable enough to just show up at the châteaus of wealthy family or friends. Others had few possessions and had no destination, no means of transport as trains had stopped running and petrol/gas supplies , if they were lucky enough to have a car, were limited. The most terrifying part is not from the invaders, but from out-of-control poor French adolescents who murder a humble priest who has been caring for them. Here is an example Némirovsky showing her consciousness of class in French society. The humble priest is from a wealthy family, the boys who kill him are under-nourished san culottes

The second novel,”Dolce” has only tenuous connection with “Storm”. It’s obvious from writings in notebooks that these ties would be worked on and continued in the next three novels. Some of the notes were written in English. Possibly sixty years later by the daughter?

However I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the two novellas that survive. The style is consistent throughout.

“Storm” describes the German occupation of the French village of Bussy, a farming community in an idyllic setting. Here the Germans and French have ambiguous relationships with one another. Some French residents will not speak to the German soldiers they are forced to billet. Others have flings or affaires. Mostly the German troops are tolerated.

The two main characters are the German commander Bruno, and Lucile, a young French woman whose husband is a POW in Germany. The two have an almost affaire. Here the novel explores the deep and unbridgeable differences between the military Germans and the invaded French. For a fleeting time, four months, the two groups live in a fragile harmony with human decency ensuring a peaceful coexistence for most of the story.

Again Némirovsky shows the class differences that permeate French society. The rich exploit and despise the poor farmers who are the livelihood of the village. Two upper middle-class women joke about how they could eat crow soup but would despise the poor who would stoop so low as to devour it. The village mayor and his wife are without conscience when they fraternize with the Germans, whitest the poor do so of necessity or love.

With Bruno and Lucile, the would-be lovers, and an “‘incident” involving a local and the Germans, we move into page-turner territory. And it is here an alliance of sorts is made between the French rich and poor. Being French can after all, when push comes to shove, trump wealth.

I didn’t want this book to finish, and in the closing passages I was in tears when, knowing of the author’s fate, I read her parting words of hope for the future of the people she had created in these short works.

Highly recommended. show less

Summary: Suite Française is the first two novellas from an unfinished five-novella work - unfinished because Irène Némirovsky, a French Jew, was captured by the Germans in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died a month later. The first novella, Storm in June, follows the fates of the refugees who are forced to flee from the German advance on Paris in June 1940. The story follows several groups - an upper-middle class family, a priest sheparding a group of orphans and delinquents, a writer and his mistress, and a couple of working-class bank employees - as they are forced to abandon their lives and possessions, and make their way towards the illusion of safety while basic transportation and infrastructure is being bombed by the show more Germans. The second novella, Dolce, centers around the small town of Bussy during the period of German occupation. German officers are being quartered in French homes, what scarce supplies there are have been requisitioned, and although the occupation may seem benign and even peaceful on a personal level, there are bitter tensions roiling under the surface.

Review: Most, if not all, of the books I've read about war, focus around a hero, or at least a protagonist who does something heroic. On the battlefield, in the resistance, fighting the Nazis, saving the Jews; most books are about ordinary people rising above themselves in times of crisis to do something extraordinary. Suite Française is not that book at all. It's about ordinary people, behaving as ordinary people do - mean, selfish, petty, obsessed with class and status, confusing personal and nationalistic feelings, spiteful, resigned - people going about the business of surviving and living. And, while we all might want to think that we'd be one of the heroes in a time of crisis, the characters of Suite Française are too starkly, nakedly human for us not to have an immediate (and frequently unpleasant) sense of recognition and identification with them. This is also an atypical World War II book in that it is strangely apolitical, and does not mention Jews or the Holocaust at all (especially strange given that the author was Jewish). The Germans are depicted as mostly young, polite, and sensitive men, missing their homes and families, and doing their best behave well, even while being part of an occupying army. The focus is not on the war itself - no mention of motives, political or tactical manuevers, or strategy is made - but rather on the effect of the war on civilians and ordinary French people.

The writing is also dissimilar to many books I've read; it's narrated from a third-person omniscient that frequently jumps points of view, and will occasionally tell a scene from the perspective of the cat, or a nameless eavesdropping girl, or a stranger on the street. Némirovsky handles this shifting perspective better than most authors; however, if I let my attention wander at all, I would frequently lose the thread of the story for a minute or two before I could figure out how and why the scene had shifted. Other than that, the writing was smooth and rich, filled with descriptive metaphors and details that gave an instant feel for both setting and tone. Both narrators did a fine job with their piece, although neither was particularly stand-out, and I'm unclear as to why two narrators were needed for the two different sections. Also, the audiobook does not include the outline for subsequent sections and Némirovsky's correspondence that is included in most print versions. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Not a particularly pleasant or uplifting read, but it paints a vivid picture of France under German occupation, and gives a perspective on World War II that I hadn't encountered before; for that, as well as for the richly textured writing, this book deserves the attention that's been paid to it, and is worth the read. show less

During 1941-1942, Irène Némirovsky was living with her husband and daughters at Issy-l’Éveque, south-west of Dijon. Unable to publish because of the antisemitic laws in force in occupied France, she worked on a grand, unpublishable novel which would paint a comprehensive picture of France under the Germans. It would have stretched to at least four parts and 1000 pages, had she been able to complete her plan, and it might well have gone further than that as the war advanced. However, she was only able to complete the first two parts (already a good 500 pages) before being arrested by French gendarmes on 13 July 1942 and handed over to the Germans for deportation to Auschwitz, where she was murdered on arrival. Her daughters were show more able to go into hiding and survived the war, with the help of their governess. They preserved the manuscript, but, taking it for a private diary of her last days, they were reluctant to look at it. It only became clear sixty years later that it was actually an unfinished novel.

Tempête en juin opens the book with an episodic account of the panic of June 1940, as Parisians try to escape from the advancing invasion. Némirovsky follows several different groups of refugees through the chaos, and we get a good sense of where the book is going as she shows us the selfishness and cowardice of wealthy intellectuals, bourgeois families and business people as the panic develops and contrasts it with the much better behaviour of her lower-middle-class and peasant characters. Needless to say, most of the rich survive, despite their bad behaviour, whilst the self-sacrifice of the poor is unrewarded more often than not.

The second part, Dolce has a tighter, more narrative structure, looking at life in a French village where a German regiment has been stationed during the months leading up to July 1941. French villagers and German soldiers have to find a modus vivendi, but neither side can ever quite forget the real tensions underlying their relationships. Many of the French have husbands or sons who are prisoners of war or were killed during the invasion, and of course many of them still remember the previous war (or even the war of 1870). But most of the Germans, when you get to know them, are just normal people who in civil life love music and books, have wives and children at home, and so on. Némirovsky again makes fun of the selfishness of the bourgeois families and the total disconnection with real life of the local aristocracy — the Pétain-supporting countess may hate all Germans on principle, but she is also the only character in the book (so far) who really shares all their racist and authoritarian ideals. And she can’t understand why the local farmers hate her.

Having read about Némirovsky’s fate, I somehow expected this to be a “Holocaust novel”, but of course it’s nothing of the sort. In the two completed parts there aren’t even any Jewish characters (although some seem to have been planned for later parts). It’s a very French novel, about French society and the way it coped, or failed to cope, with one of its most difficult periods of history. In an odd way, it reminded me of Angela Thirkell’s “home front” novels from the same period, although of course Thirkell was writing about the same kind of wartime social collisions from a perspective in which all her sympathy was with the bourgeois and aristocratic characters forced to give up their privileged lifestyle. Némirovsky seems to find that it’s about time those privileged people had a dose of reality — even though she came from a pretty privileged background herself, and her most convincing and sympathetic characters are at least on the edge of those privileged families. show less

When I opened this book, I had long forgotten how it had come into my library some years before. Fortunately, I have a semblance of a TBR shelf, so it didn’t get lost amid the many other volumes. I noted the publication date: 2004. Oh this looks like good historical fiction! Happy with my discovery and before reading a page, I traveled in my mind to June 1940, imagining myself glaring angrily at the Nazis, marching into Paris. I thought of Casablanca, as Rick made the plans that would tear him away from Ilsa until the moment she walked into that gin joint a world away.

But in Paris, the fear and chaos jumped off the page. Sounds and smells and human reactions felt almost too sharp, too acrid, details almost like someone had been there. show more It begins:

“Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn't sleep—the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?"

I felt confused. What a remarkable recreation of a moment, almost a century gone by now. The voice was almost of someone who had been there. The necessary research and grasp of the social subtleties staggered me. I reflected on great works of historical fiction I have read: Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series, Toni Morrison’ Beloved, and the delightful A Gentleman in Moscow from Amor Towles, for example. Surely there is historical fiction and great historical fiction!

Then I realized. The sights and sounds were fresh and believable not because of Némirovsky’s powers of reconstruction and creative authenticity. This was not historical fiction at all. She was there. A quick check revealed the truth: Némirovsky wrote the two novellas in this collection, probably not fully completed, nearly contemporaneously with the events they describe. The time frame is June 1940 to July 1941. The setting Paris and the French countryside. She was born a Ukrainian Jew in Kiev in 1903, fled to France in the face of the Russian Revolution, attended the Sorbonne, published a popular French novel in 1929, and was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1939. She was arrested in July 1942 in front of her daughters - the Nazis evidently not impressed with her conversion - and died in Auschwitz a month later. Her daughter kept the manuscripts unread for fifty years thinking they were journals that would be too painful to read. Prior to donating the material to a French archive, she read it. Published to critical acclaim in 2004, Suite française became a best seller in France.

Némirovsky’s achievement is astonishing. There are many surviving accounts of historical moments. They tend to be observational in the form of diaries and witnessed reports. She not only described the events around her in miniature journalistic detail, but was able to craft her narrative with social commentary, psychological interpretation, perceptive analysis, and fully realized though fictional characters. She was inside the heads of her French compatriots even as she herself was enduring the hardships of danger and escape. And description fails to do justice to her efficient and reflective prose:

“The three young men stood up and clicked their heels. In the past, she had found this display of courtesy by the soldiers of the Reich old-fashioned and rather affected. Now, she thought how much she would miss this light jingling of spurs, the kiss on the hand, the admiration these soldiers showed her almost in spite of themselves, soldiers who were without family, without female companionship. There was in their respect for her a hint of tender melancholy: it was as if, thanks to her, they could recapture some remnant of their former lives where kindness, a good education, politeness towards women had far more value than getting drunk or taking an enemy position. There was gratitude and nostalgia in their attitude towards her; she could sense it and was touched by it.”

This is a fine work, a time capsule of a fraught and crucial period. Journalism has been described as the first rough draft of history. Némirovsky’s novel has the persuasive integrity of good journalism, but the draft feels anything but rough. show less

It’s quite good. A study of social classes under pressure as well as the randomness and ultimate futility of war. The stupid waste of it all. That said, the approach is not intimate, there are multiple people and family stories loosely woven together. I never fully engaged in the people but I did engage in the meta criticism (tl:dr people suck except for the people that don’t, but man oh man being rich or very poor don’t make for excellent humans)

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 show more 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. show less