Suite Francaise (Vintage International)

by Irene Nemirovsky

Dr Sandra Smith, Dr (Translator), Sandra Smith, Dr (Translator), and Sandra Smith (Translator)

Read the lost masterpiece behind the major new film starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Michelle Williams

In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. Nemirovsky's death in Auschwitz in 1942 prevented her from seeing the day, sixty-five years later, that the existing two sections of her planned novel sequence, Suite Francaise, would be rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece.

Set during the year that France fell to the Nazis, Suite Francaise falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation. Suite Francaise is a novel that teems with wonderful characters struggling with the new regime. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and love exist, but often in surprising places.

• ISBN10: 1400044731
• ISBN13: 9781400044733
• Publish Date: 11 April 2006 (first published 16 March 2006)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 29 July 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Random House Inc
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 395
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

On judging books by covers, this was exactly opposite of anything I expected. In short, a plain-clothed masterpiece, written by someone who knew Tolstoy by heart; what he did for Moscow in 1812, 1817, Némirovsky begins for Paris in 1940. It's not a book about war; it's a book about the men and the women, good and better and worse, living so tangled and fragile in the midst of it. "What lives on:" writes Némirovsky as some of her final words to survive, "1, Our humble day-to-day lives. 2, Art. 3, God." She wanted a symphony; she created the opening strains. As she notes Forster on the similarly composed War and Peace, with "expansion. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out." Pieces of a much grander whole.

Although, granted, completion in any sense was less and less an option; something she would grasp, writing history as history was writing itself, working all the more furiously as time ran itself out. On 28 June, 1941, her journal takes note of events that would inspire the poignant end of Dolce, the second volume of her intended five, as German forces take leave of the occupied French village:

"They're leaving. They were depressed for twenty-four hours, now they're cheerful, especially when they're together. The little dear one sadly said, 'The happy times are over.' They're sending their packages home. They're overexcited, that's obvious. Admirably disciplined and, I think, no rebellion in their hearts. I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religious, convictions, prejudices, errors. I feel sorry for these poor children. But I cannot forgive certain individuals, those who reject me, those who coldly abandon us, those who are prepared to stab you in the back. These people... if I ever get my hands on them... When will it all end? The troops that were here last summer said 'Christmas,' then July. Now end '41."

"I must create something great," she writes soon thereafter, "and stop wondering if there's any point." Sixty-four years later and it has survived with the greatest of these: our humble lives, our art, our God. There is a point, and it's everything necessary.