bitter-Suite Française

I finished this fine novel some days ago but it has taken until now for me to sort out what I think about it. It is a remarkable accomplishment, given the circumstances the author was in as she struggled to finsh the manuscript before being arrested and sent to a concentration camp. It was also a true labor of love for her two surviving daughters to have protected the work for more than 60 years before it was published in France in 2004 and translated and published in the US in 2006. My sister gave me this book for Christmas two years ago and it was the book she was reading at the time of her death.

It’s part history, part fiction, part biography, and more than part autobiography. The writing is by turns poignant, funny, sly, fevered, angry and informative. The author, Irène Némirovsky was living the life she was writing about; the onset of WW II, the invasion and occupation of France by the Germans, the flight from Paris, sanctuary in the French countryside for her and her family. Hers was the same experience shared by millions of Parisians and others from various parts of France. The novel was conceived as a “suite” in five parts. She lived long enough to complete only two of the five. This is where there is some disappointment for this reader. In the first two parts she sets up a cast of marvelous characters from all quarters of French society; the rich, the regal, the bourgeois, the working class, the brave and the cowardly, all depicted with care, nuance, clarity and both severity and sympathy. But finally we have no idea what befell these people who have aroused our emotions. We don’t know the fate of those we like and those we decide behaved badly. We want more. But there is no more.

Némirovsky was arrested on July 13, 1942, sent to Auschwitz where she died on August 17, 1942. She was 39 years old.