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Suite Fran?aise is a singularly piercing evocation--at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic--of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
Knopf
April 2006
416 pages
ISBN: 1400044731
Hardcover
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Fiction
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky
began working on what would become Suite Française--the
first two parts of a planned five-part novel--she was
already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she
was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to
Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of
thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in
central France--where she, her husband, and their two small
daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the
Nazis--she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a
human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When
she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic,
the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a
suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding
and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long
last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the
massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi
invasion during which several families and individuals are
thrown together under circumstances beyond their control.
They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival--some
trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling
simply to preserve their lives--but soon, all together, they
will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and
emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world
they know. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the
increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial
village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted
among them, the villagers--from aristocrats to shopkeepers
to peasants--cope as best they can. Some choose resistance,
others collaboration, and as their community is transformed
by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal
nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
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