Suite Francaise

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky blurs well defined categories of genre and presents real life in a creative collage. The unfinished work consists of two novellas and two appendixes. The manuscript had been kept by Nemirovsky's daughter who had refused to read it for years, because her mother had died in Auschwitz, and the daughter didn't want to revisit the painful memories.

The first novella, "Storm in June," narrates the evacuation from Paris of multiple families fleeing the Germans in 1940. Nemirovsky uses the Olympian eye to see the large picture while combining multiple tales simultaneously. She follows the Pericand family, the Cortez couple, the Michauds and their son Jean-Marie as they pack and prepare to depart for safer climes. Petty preoccupations and emotional ties are explored as each family leaves the city. With the eye of a cinematographer and the insight of a psychologist as Nemirovsky delves into the lives of her characters. Each story deals with life and death decisions superimposed on mundane needs and egocentric vanities.

The second novella, "Dolce" deals with German occupation in France. Nemirovsky shows war in real time. Not every minute is horrible. Seen primarily through the eyes of the French, the Germans are sometimes perceived as human; and the French are sometimes inhumane. People are people and hatred and combat are not the only experience in wartime.

Both novellas follow a linear movement toward conflict and death, a straight line toward the unknown. Is this not what life is about, Nemirovsky asks? But she deftly includes another movement. Underneath the linear progress is a comforting cyclical movement, nature's cycles, repetitious twenty-four hour days, the pattern of seasons, the biological mating instinct--all ordinary patterns continuing in spite of war.

The appendixes consist of the Nemirovsky's notes on her work in progress allowing the reader to get inside the mind of the writer. She asks: "Which of the scenes deserve to be passed on to posterity?" (p.374). She struggles with objectivity: "My idea is for it to unravel like a film, but at times the temptation is great, and I've given in with brief descriptions or in the episode that follows the meeting at the schoolboy giving my own point of view. Should I mercilessly pursue this?" (p. 376).

Nemirovsky writes while fleeing Paris. All lives are upset; all priorities must be reassessed. Suite Francaise, a Novel stands alone as art without tapping the biography of the author, but once the reader understands circumstances of Nemirovsky's writing, which is that she is writing fiction about events she is experiencing in real time, immediacy and poignancy is added to this work. In Nemirovsky's own story, which is not a part of this novel, she dies in Auschwitz. Her journal entries tell the reader she understands she may die. Her tragic end prevented the completion of the work as she had envisioned it. Reading the uncompleted novellas with the appendixes make the total work a revealing story of Irene Nemirovsky's life told with consciousness that moves the story beyond individual experience to the universal experience of war. Genres merge. Is this fiction, autobiography, memoir, documentary? The collection of texts in this work creates a new genre, a collage, a scrapbook of life. It is real, it is human, and it makes us understand more about the human condition.

I finished reading "Suite Francaise", a thoroughly absorbing book. How I would like to write like Neimerovsky! Usually I want to plow through description and flowery words and get to the plot. I think that is the male way. In this book, however, the descriptions are more than dressing; they are part of the meaning and must be read. They also add to the beauty of the prose and take you to the far away place the author wants you to go. Once there, she allows the plot and dialogue to flow. The dialogue is sparse, but even so great meaning is extracted from the characters.

Our civilization is built upon such flimsy foundations. The beauty we revere in art and happiness from possessions are jettisoned once one is hungry and without shelter. Our motives become baser as our survival needs go unmet. Those who want the least, like the priest, tend to be the happiest and can make do. As civilization crumbles, we learn that skills as a poet, banker, or artist become worthless. The man that can grow food, raise horses fares better. Women live by their wits, using looks to survive; an age old option justified for self preservation.

In "Suite", security is paramount. It's once one takes for granted or is completely secure in his basic needs can he move on to gratifying other wants: love, ambition, material possessions.

The most despicable people in the novel are those who feel entitled to their perch and do not realize that they are flabby pink shallow beasts surviving on a largesse they did not earn. These people inherited their wealth or gained it in endeavours that mean little in the new world of occupation.

The saddest characters are those that have passion, but no one to love. Lucille and Bruno, you really feel for them.

Nemirovsky depicts the German soldiers who occupy a French farming village as noble, handsome, blond, decent, refined, educated, having impeccable manners and bearing, gallant in their elegant uniforms and on their beautiful mounts, respectful of French property, and anxious not to tweak the resentment or hurt the feelings of the defeated local population. We're to shed bitter tears for the young lads as they march off at the end of the book, dispatched to the Russian front.

The only less-than-noble German soldier is the base commander's emotionally erratic translator. Lieutenant Bonnet exhibits momentary flashes of sadism. However, we soon learn he's not really German -- he's of French descent and is marked with a name of French origin.

In contrast to the noble Nazi -- excuse me, German -- soldiers, the French villagers are mostly petty, vulgar (the farmers) or pompous (the aristocrats), money-grubbing, and hateful collaborators. The sole exception is the beautiful, blond Lucille. ("Blond" seems to be a marker for an admirable person.) She's married to an absent, boorish husband held captive in a German prisoner of war camp. The lonely, affection-starved Lucille has a dashing German cavalry officer as a border; he's been billeted to her grand manse, the most beautiful house in the village. There's no avoiding that Nemirovsky has here set up the plot-line of a trite bodice ripper.

The rather far-fetched back story of SUITE FRANCAISE is that the manuscript remained unread in a suitcase owned by Nemirovsky's daughter since 1942 and was only recently rediscovered and reclaimed. However, it's more reasonable to surmise that the book was far too pro-German and anti-French to have been released earlier. It's no longer impossible in polite society to mention sympathetically the suffering of the German people during World War II and to consider that, yes, they were victims too. It's hard to know how far the pendulum will swing in this direction, but it currently has quite a bit of momentum. Take, for instance, Nicholson Baker's HUMAN SMOKE (2008), which puts the Allies and the Nazis on the same moral plane.

Nemirovsky says 2 million Frenchmen surrendered to the Germans but few died defending their families and homeland. In fact, in the two-months-long Battle of France, 90,000 French soldiers were killed and 200,000 were wounded, or roughly as many casualties as America suffered over the entire Second World War, proportionate to our greater population (40,500,000 versus 132,000,000).

Why the blatantly pro-Nazi, anti-French stance of SUITE FRANCAISE didn't arouse critical comment when the book was published in France -- not to mention anger and censure -- is a mystery to me. One possible explanation is that we have a weakness for imbuing victims with saintly characteristics. The Nazis murdered Nemirovsky at Auschwitz, so she must have been holy, blameless and above reproach. Her book acquired an aura of goodness that blinds readers to its actual contents.

The omniscient narrator of SUITE FRANCAISE (probably Nemirovsky herself) writes on page 291: "What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork." Nemirovsky probably did not entirely forget she was a Jew but her primary identity was with the aristocracy of her birth and upbringing in the Russian royal court, before the Bolsheviks ended that society of extreme privilege. Had she self-identified as a Jew, she most likely would have fled to Switzerland with her husband and two daughters when they had the opportunity. Instead, she seems to have felt closer kinship with the groups persecuting Jews, never imagining they'd turn on her too. On page 334, Nemirovsky writes: "Who dared predict the future? Although that's all people did... and always in vain."

The style of writting is so unique, so individual. Not your common style of writting. & the story so convincing too.
At the end, reading the author's notes also made it all so real too. I really felt for her

The book was a selection for a book group. I knew nothing of it before. The author's style was unique and satisfying. The appendices were particularly valuable. One gave a look into the way an author can structure the actual writing of a novel. The other presented the history of the author and the book. I will look for her other novels. Sadly the author was lost to the Holocaust or there could have been more.