Synopsis:
From The Washington Post
This extraordinary work of fiction about the German occupation of France is embedded in a real story as gripping and complex as the invented one. Composed in 1941-42 by an accomplished writer who had published several well-received novels, Suite Française, her last work, was written under the tremendous pressure of a constant danger that was to catch up with her and kill her before she had finished.

Irène Némirovsky was a Jewish, Russian immigrant from a wealthy family who had fled the Bolsheviks as a teenager. She spent her adult life in France, wrote in French but preserved the detachment and cool distance of the outsider. She and her husband were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was gassed upon arrival and she died in the infirmary at the age of 39. Her manuscript, in minuscule and barely readable handwriting, was preserved by her daughters, who, ignorant of the fact that these notebooks contained a full-fledged masterpiece, left it unread until 60 years later. Once published, with an appendix that illuminates the circumstances of its origin and the author’s plan for its completion, it quickly became a bestseller in France. It is hard to imagine a reader who will not be wholly engrossed and moved by this book.

Némirovsky’s plan consisted of five parts. She completed only the first two before she was murdered. Yet they are not fragmentary; they read like polished novellas. The first, “Storm in June,” gives us a cross section of the population during the initial exodus from the capital, when a battle for Paris was expected and people fled helter-skelter south, so that the roads were clogged with refugees of all classes. Némirovsky shows how much caste and money continued to matter, how the nation was not united in the face of danger and a common enemy. In her account, the well-to-do continue to be especially egotistical and petty. And yet a deep, unsentimental sympathy pervades this panorama. Looking up to the sky at enemy planes overhead, the refugees who have to sleep on the street or in their cars “lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them.” I can’t think of a more chilling and concise image to convey the helplessness of civilians in an air raid.

Not being French herself but steeped in French culture may have made it easier for Némirovsky to achieve her penetrating insights with Flaubertian objectivity. She gives us startling, steely etched sketches of both collaboration and resistance among people motivated by personal loyalties and grievances that date from before the war.

The second part, “Dolce” (the title — Italian for “sweet” — derives from Némirovsky’s plan to give the work a musical structure), covers the occupation by the Germans of a small village, from the so-called armistice in June 1940 to the Soviet Union’s entry into the war a year later. One can forget that there was a period after the defeat of France when World War II could be seen simply as a war between Germany and Britain. The villagers yearn for peace, and many are indifferent as to who wins, England or Germany, as long as their own men come home. Némirovsky is superb in describing how fraternization comes about, including French girls and women giving in to the attractions of the handsome German occupants — there are no other men around, most of the French men having been taken prisoner. But the unnatural situation also breeds fierce feelings of resentment and humiliation. Némirovsky embodies this conflict in the story of a woman who falls in love with a German officer and at the same time hides a villager wanted for the murder of another German — a murder motivated partly by patriotic hatred and partly by marital jealousy.

One puzzling omission from the spectrum of conquered and cowering French society is the Jews — the one group that was more endangered than any other, as Némirovsky knew only too well. Perhaps she wanted to save the fate of the Jews for the next part, which was to be entitled “Captivity.” Even so, when one thinks of the threat the Jewish population endured even at this early stage of persecution, one feels the significant gap here.

Still, this is an incomparable book, in some ways sui generis. While diaries give us a day-to-day record, their very inclusiveness can lead to tedium; memoirs, on the other hand, written at a later date, search for highlights and illuminate the past from the vantage point of the present. In Némirovsky’s Suite Française we have the perfect mixture: a gifted novelist’s account of a foreign occupation, written while it was taking place, with history and imagination jointly evoking a bitter time, correcting and enriching our memory.

Reviewed by Ruth Kluger
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
It was a wonderful read. It wasn’t a novel really. It was more like a novella with short vignettes about the time of German Occupation of France in WWII. There were many different characters and different points of view about what the French experienced during the War. She chose different characters from different classes. There were the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie,
the farmers, the lower working class, the influential writers. Each chapter revolved around a different class of people and how they endured the War. You can still see that a caste system is still in place. The wealthy were hardly affected by the war as much as the poor people. Their views on the war were different. The wealthy knew that they could come out of it alive and still retain their station in life. The poor however were struggling to survive and flee their villages. They didn’t have money to bribe people in other villages for food and petrol (if they had a car, which most didn’t.) The poor also had many of their husbands in the war, most taken as prisoners by the Germans. The wealthy were far removed from that. Irene had a wonderful way of weaving her vignettes. Her metaphors and descriptions were amazing. She’s a very good writer. It’s an unfinished novel, since it was being written before she was killed in Auschwitz. She was Jewish and despite her fame, she was executed. So was her husband. Her two daughters were able to survive by hiding from the Germans and changing their names. The most interesting stories were about how the Germans were billeted to certain villages and lived with the French. Every French household had to take in a soldier. It was interesting to see how polite and somewhat kind the Germans were to the French. Well probably not to the Jews. But Irene doesn’t write about them. She didn’t have a chance to finish the book. But the Germans were rather friendly with the French. Although they made it clear that they were the conquerors. There are references to WWI when the French conquered Germany. But it didn’t seem like the Germans were trying to exact revenge. They were polite and civilized and treated the French decently. The wealthy French were treated even better. There wasn’t this feeling that all the French were in this war together. There were definitely class boundaries and divisiveness. It was interesting to note that the French and Germans managed to get along with each other despite the fact that this was wartime and the Germans were the enemy. Some French refused to deal with the Germans unless they had to. But for the most part the French were curious about the Germans and fraternized with them.

I thought it was a very well-written book. I wish Irene wasn’t murdered so that she could have finished the book. It would have been interesting to see the part about how the Jews were treated. If you’re interested in French History during the time of German Occupation of France during WWII, then I highly recommend this book. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. I didn’t give it five because it’s an unfinished book. But still, it was rather good and illuminating. It gave you a bird’s eye view of what actually transpired during that time. At the end of the book is an Appendix that shows Irene’s notes for the novel as well as correspondence to her Publishers and correspondence from her husband looking for Irene when she was taken as a Jewish prisoner and sent to be executed.

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