When Irène Némirovsky began work on “Suite Française,” she envisioned a novel of more than 1,000 pages. It would unfold in five movements, each reflecting a different aspect of occupied France during World War II.
It was not to be. Némirovsky, a Jew who’d immigrated to France from the Ukraine, had a well-established writing career. But neither her success as a writer nor her conversion to Catholicism made any difference during the occupation. In July 1942 she was arrested in the small town in central France where she, her husband and two daughters had fled, hoping to escape the Nazis’ reach.
She died a month later at Auschwitz. Her husband, soon after, met a similar fate. Her daughters, cared for by a friend of the family, took their mother’s notebook with them into hiding.
The notebook contained notes for “Suite Française,” and the two novellas that make up the work, “Storm in June” and “Dolce,” written in haste and in minuscule longhand. The French edition was published in 2004, but the translation we are reading leaves none of the power of the work behind.
“Storm in June” is set in 1940 as Parisians flee the city in the face of advancing German troops. An omniscient narrator follows several families, linked only by the times, as they journey to Tours. Each group of characters – the upper-class Pèricand family, the famous writer Gabriel Corte and his mistress, the working class Michaud family – face similar challenges: roads clogged with refugees, no food or petrol and attacking German planes. A heroic story would have these disparate people unite in the face of adversity, but there is little heroic in Némirovsky’s narrative.
The second section, “Dolce,” takes place several months later during the German occupation of Bussy. The tone of this novella is quieter, though its insights no less scathing. Némirovsky again anchors her plot in class differences, focusing on the upper-class collaborators, the middle-class landowners and the working-class tenant farmers. German soldiers are billeted in homes, providing the potential to close class differences. Instead, it only more clearly draws lines between wealth, age and experience.
Novels are generally structured with chapters that weave together to lead the reader further into the story. Némirovsky takes a different approach. Each of her chapters could stand alone, much as a short story, with rising and falling action, coming to closure at the end. The result invites the reader to contemplate each chapter before turning to the next page.
“Suite Française” is a hauntingly lovely work for many reasons. The stories woven through are subtle and dead-on in their insight into the human condition. The prose is evocative, immersing the reader in the combined chaos and deadly calm of waiting that reflect wartime.
The genesis of this novel, flowing from the pen of a writer working under the knowledge that she had much to say and little time in which to say it, adds inescapable tragic and heroic dimensions. In a time when the people of France were working to Aryanize their country, Némirovsky was writing to reveal the cost of collaboration. In the preface to the French edition of the novel, Myriam Anissimov wrote, “In her writing she denounced fear, cowardice, acceptance of humiliation, of persecution, of massacre. She was alone. It was rare to find anyone in the literary and publishing worlds who did not choose to collaborate with the Nazis.”
Two appendices, along with the preface to the French edition, are included at the end of the novel. The first appendix, Némirovsky’s notes on the novel, provides insight to her vision for the work. The second is correspondence, revealing first the tightening net of anti- Semitism and then the desperate, and ultimately doomed, attempts to free her after her arrest.
As she began to envision “Suite Française,” Nemirovsky was reacting to the fact that France, the home she’d adopted, refused to adopt her. She wrote, “Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, as it loses its honor and its life.” She has achieved this goal magnificently, and this voice from the grave reminds us that honor is a quality no generation, regardless of history, can afford to sacrifice.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Suite Francaise
By Irène Némirovsky
Knopf, 395 pages, $25
