The Book: Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky
The Story: This is the first two parts of a planned 5 part novel. Before she could finish her work, Irene Nemirovsky was taken to a concentration camp where she was killed. She was writing a novel about WWII while it was happening, making this one of (if not the very) the earliest WWII novels.
Because this is an incomplete work, it’s hard to describe a “story” here.
In the first part, we are introduced to several stories, several sets of characters. Everyone is moving around France, trying to steer clear of the Nazi’s. They very from young to old, from rich to not-as-rich. She kind of spread herself out across the country and just really showed what the onset of the war looked like to all these different people.
The second part focused more intently on a small village that has recently become occupied by the Germans. The people in the town are trying to maintain these very normal lifestyles while the world is kind of exploding around them.
In the notes and the appendix, Irene’s notes for the last 3 parts are shown as well as a series of her correspondence. After she was captured, there is a series of correspondence with her husband and others trying to find her and get her out. The end result was his death as well.
What I Thought: This was certainly not a cheery, happy book. Goodness sakes. It was sad from cover to cover.
I went into this kind of reluctantly although I had heard great reviews. I guess just knowing that the story itself wasn’t going to end in a tied-up way and that I was only getting 2/5ths of what the author intended made me feel like the rest was going to be an inferior product. Not true.
I was impressed with how (after I got them straight in my head) the characters really jumped off of the page. Maybe it was because she was writing this at the time everything was happening and these people were likely right in front of her, but she just captured a part of WWII that I had never been exposed to before.
I know that Irene Nemirovsky was a famous author in France at the time of the war, but before this book I had never heard of her. Turns out her writing has true literary merit. The two parts that she completed are simply beautiful. Here is a passage that I dog-eared in my copy because I thought it was pretty close to perfect:
“Important events- whether serious, happy or unfortunate- do not change a man’s soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows; they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.”
Yum, right? I love that.
I would love to read a non-fiction book about the life of this author because the forward and the appendix really interested me just as much as the novel. I am not sure if this exists but I would love to check it out if it does.
Conclusion: A beautifully written, but incomplete picture of life in France during WWII. Don’t read this if you want a full, complete story. That’s not happening here. What is happening is something worth checking out though and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in that time period.