This is the 1st of the 2 World War II stories I'll begin my new year with (after a long leave of absence - it's not that I haven't been reading, but more of other things to do.. :Þ)
Irene Nemirovsky is a renowned Russian Jew authoress who married a Frenchman, thus she writes of WWII from the French point of view (in French). She is well-known for her book David Golder (which I will track down and read, hopefully soon). Suite Francaise was meant to be a set-of-5; unfortunately she had only finished 2 when she was forcefully taken away, and sent to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers (even more poignant when I remember that I was just there, where she would have stood years ago!). How the book got published is a miracle as well, because her whole family was split up in the war, and her manuscripts were saved only because one of her daughters took it along with her, as a keepsake of her mother.
I would say it's not a typical WWII book, nor a typical book at all, as she weaves intricate stories of French people from different strata of society with the bombing of Paris and the eventual addition of German soldiers into French life. Her characters' lives cross in unexpected ways, and are totally believable and French. She does deal more with the middle- and upper-class people, which is to be expected since she was part of that society and would have known it well enough, but does give place for the lower classes in her book, in the sense of their dealings with the higher classes.
It gives us a keen insight into life during those days - how people coped with the onset of war and the influx of strange Germans whom the loved to hate and came to tolerate. You know she's writing about a war, but the war becomes a secondary thing, only something that has caused change, as you are drawn into the characters' lives. She realised that, in the years to come, people wouldn't be interested in the facts of history, but would be interested to know the commonplace details of life, and she made it a point to write about those, and put those into words in such an artful manner, resulting in this intricately crafted work.
The inclusion of her notes for the novel in the end of the edition I read made it clear she hadn't finished with this work yet, but if she had, it would have been one wonderful piece of work. The next appendix tells of her own war story, through correspondence between her husband and other people. The appendices are apt, melding Nemirovsky's history into her own story, her end becoming the story's end as well. It is as if Suite Francaise has become a mirror for who Nemirovsky was and felt, and it can only be so, that her work would tie in to her life.
Rating: **** out of 5
