by Irene Nemirovsky
Reviewed by Cara Black

The fictional story of Suite Française, a novel published from a
manuscript hidden in a suitcase for sixty four years cannot be separated
from the true one. Or should it be, as I was reminded by the novel’s
inside cover with Irene Nemirovsky’s blue handwritten script and in the
appendices reading the letters of her husband who in vain tried to save
her from Auschwitz and later was deported himself.

Already a highly successful author of nine novels whose bestselling work, Daniel Golder, had been filmed, Irene Nemirovsky knew and navigated a pre-war Paris strata of intellegentsia. And she, as they, experienced the exodus from Paris which she skillfully wove and counterpointed from what could have been an incredible memoir into a deep and breathtaking novel.

Most memoirs, I have read of that era, benefit from a distance and astute look back, but Irene Nemirovsky wrote this as it happened (1939 until 1942 when she was rounded up in the village and deported) making the fictional Suite Francaise all the more remarkable. She was fictionalizing life, as she lived and experienced it, in German occupied France and more poignantly, wearing a yellow star.

Sandra Smiths’ wonderful translation from the French does more than
justice to the language dripping with sensory detail. From the
beginning the novel’s words seduce “...dawn was near and the war far away.

The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn’t sleep- the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh...it came from afar...slowly, lazily...they still
dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the
woods...until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring “Is it an air raid?”

And I, the reader, was pulled into the ‘Storm of June’ the first
section of Suite Francaise into the hot June of 1939, along the dust and
refugee filled roads out of Paris strafed by German Luftwaffe and the
novel never let me go. Originally conceived as a five part opus as
outlined in Irene’s notebooks, the novel, comprises two parts begining with the chaos of exodus from Paris where all - haut bourgeoise, writers,
workers and families face the reality of invading Germans.

‘Dolce’ the
second finished section  takes place during the occupation of a seemingly
sleepy village in the Loire Valley. Lyrical, ironic and perceptive a
human drama unfolds on a small scale mirroring the larger one in France.
   

But in both ‘Storm of June’ and ‘Dolce’ Nemirovsky gives an insightful view into her characters - I almost felt she disected stratas of society and examined individuals gifts and flaws on the head of a pin with an acute accuracy that only an outsider (and Irene was a Ukrainian
Jew, a successful émigre novelist in Paris) would see.

The cutting dialogue, portraits of characters enmeshed in rigid social structures, the pang of hunger...all that makes collaboration a necessity and for a gripping, unflinching view of a defeated, demoralized France.

This is brought to life while exhausted mothers fleeing Paris hunt for food for their hungry children, as a wounded French soldier is cared for in the
countryside by a mother resentful that her own son is a prisoner of war, a German soldier falling in love with a Frenchwoman under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law. I saw the French aristocracy, like time
immemorial, sparing with the land-owning bourgoise in the countryside, the greed, the petty squabbles, the prejudices. A microcosm, slices of life that reveal the devastation, the hopelessness of a nation who succumbed to invaders without a fight.

But the dimension Irene Nemirovsky shows is in her humanity and the vulnerable side of the German conquerors themselves; young men and boys shipped off to Leningrad and sure slaughter as the second part, Dolce ends.

War is war, but the multi-faceted sides are so rarely portrayed as
Nemirovsky does in Suite Francaise, hunger, privation, noblesse-oblige
and the small little collaborations needed in everyday life to survive,
to exist. I turned the last page of the novel knowing these lives
weren’t finished and wanting more. What happened to the Pericands, a haut bourgoise family, or to Lucile and her love affair with the German
officer...how would it end?


I could only imagine. But would never know. And wistful I could see
the German troops march into futile battle on Russian land, farmers
sowing the fields, villagers buying butter on the black market. They had a
life created by Irene Nemirovsky that would go on unending, sadly,
unlike her own. And what deeply affected me, again touching on fiction
breathing with reality or as Oscar Wilde mocked, life imitating art, I
found in the preface to the French edition.

Here the French editor reveals how Irene Nemirovsky’s daughters, young girls at the end of the war, went each day with a sign with their names written on it, to the Hotel Lutetia - then a reception center for returning deportees - to search for their parents. Even running after a woman once who looked like her mother, but heartbreakingly wasn’t. And how it mirrored my own friend’s mother’s story, a mother who had also taken in the deportations of 1942, and who as a young girl also, haunted the Hotel Lutetia every day after school.  Maybe they saw each other, stood on the same steps, watching, waiting and hoping. Hoping for the mother who never came back.