Suite Francaise

Over Memorial Day weekend I immersed myself in Suite Francaise and now I feel like I have to write a little about it. It's one of the best things I've read in a while.

I first heard of this book from Claire Messud's Bookforum review, a review that made the book sound excellent. In addition to talking about the book, Messud talked about the story behind the book--basically, Némirovksy, the author, was a Jewish novelist in France. France was invaded by Germany in 1940 and Némirovksy went into hiding, working on the first two volumes of a projected 5 volume workt hat would have chronicled France during the second world war.

The work was never completed. After filling several notebooks with the first two volumes of Suite Francaise, Némirovksy was sent to Auschwitz, where she died. The notebooks languished for decades and were only recently published. This is Suite Francaise's first translation into English.

The first volume (190 pages) is called "Days in June" and deals almost exclusively with the civilian exodus from Paris in the week after the Germans invaded. Although this is a very short novel, Némirovksy spreads it out across almost 10 main characters, all of whom are fleeing from Paris to Tours. She brings to mind Tolstoy in the way she so realistically embodies the thoughts and emotions of seemingly anyone she chooses to.

For example, here's Jean-Marie, a young soldier whose train is bombed. He's found by some villagers in the French countryside and is taken in by a family. As he lays bedridden, two young sisters care for him:

He wondered if all the people here spoke like them or whether it was something much deeper, rooted in the very souls of these girls, in their youth, some instinct that told them that wars end and invaders leave, that even when distorted, even when mutilated, life goes on. His own mother, knitting while the soup was cooking, would sigh and say, "Ninteen-fourteen? That's the year your father and I got married. We were miserable by the end of it, but very happy at the beginning." Even that bleak year was sweetened, bathed in the reflection of their love.

In the same way, he thought, the summer of 1940 would remain in the memories of these young women as the summer they were twenty, in spite of everything.

What's perhaps most remarkable about this is that 1940s France was very much fractured along class lines. (Némirovksy opens the book with a scene in which a rich woman lets her servants listen to news of the war with her and sighs over how that seemed a bad sign of things to come.) Despite this fracturing, Némirovksy gets into the minds of rich and poor, city and country to give a wide portrait of this incredible exodus from Paris.

The second volume (150 pages) deals with the German occupation. It's unique in that Némirovksy wrote it not knowing how the war would end, or even if Germans would one day leave French soil. This makes for a very different perspective, one that is perhaps much more intimate than that of novelists who wrote books after the war ended.

I found the historical content in Suite Francaise to be very interesting, but I think I would have liked the book just as much even if I had no interest in France during World War II. Suite Francaise stands simply as a work of literature. Némirovksy's sentences are quick and direct, but flow with an undeniable beauty. She has a wonderful sense details and repeatedly gives us just the right information to elucidate a character and a situation--few of the chapters in this book are longer than 10 pages, yet they consistently provide a complete picture of a character or situation.

Comments

[Frances]

The Times did a big article on the book, which was a bestseller in France. Thanks for your take on it. I definitely will pick it up. You may be interested in reading A Woman In Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Occupied City by Anonymous. It is a diary-type book kept by a journalist after the Russians occupied Berlin in WWII. It was one of the best books I read last year. Very powerful.