When I opened this book, I had long forgotten how it had come into my library some years before. Fortunately, I have a semblance of a TBR shelf, so it didn’t get lost amid the many other volumes. I noted the publication date: 2004. Oh this looks like good historical fiction! Happy with my discovery and before reading a page, I traveled in my mind to June 1940, imagining myself glaring angrily at the Nazis, marching into Paris. I thought of Casablanca, as Rick made the plans that would tear him away from Ilsa until the moment she walked into that gin joint a world away.

But in Paris, the fear and chaos jumped off the page. Sounds and smells and human reactions felt almost too sharp, too acrid, details almost like someone had been there. It begins:

“Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But 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 wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?"

I felt confused. What a remarkable recreation of a moment, almost a century gone by now. The voice was almost of someone who had been there. The necessary research and grasp of the social subtleties staggered me. I reflected on great works of historical fiction I have read: Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series, Toni Morrison’ Beloved, and the delightful A Gentleman in Moscow from Amor Towles, for example. Surely there is historical fiction and great historical fiction!

Then I realized. The sights and sounds were fresh and believable not because of Némirovsky’s powers of reconstruction and creative authenticity. This was not historical fiction at all. She was there. A quick check revealed the truth: Némirovsky wrote the two novellas in this collection, probably not fully completed, nearly contemporaneously with the events they describe. The time frame is June 1940 to July 1941. The setting Paris and the French countryside. She was born a Ukrainian Jew in Kiev in 1903, fled to France in the face of the Russian Revolution, attended the Sorbonne, published a popular French novel in 1929, and was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1939. She was arrested in July 1942 in front of her daughters - the Nazis evidently not impressed with her conversion - and died in Auschwitz a month later. Her daughter kept the manuscripts unread for fifty years thinking they were journals that would be too painful to read. Prior to donating the material to a French archive, she read it. Published to critical acclaim in 2004, Suite française became a best seller in France.

Némirovsky’s achievement is astonishing. There are many surviving accounts of historical moments. They tend to be observational in the form of diaries and witnessed reports. She not only described the events around her in miniature journalistic detail, but was able to craft her narrative with social commentary, psychological interpretation, perceptive analysis, and fully realized though fictional characters. She was inside the heads of her French compatriots even as she herself was enduring the hardships of danger and escape. And description fails to do justice to her efficient and reflective prose:

“The three young men stood up and clicked their heels. In the past, she had found this display of courtesy by the soldiers of the Reich old-fashioned and rather affected. Now, she thought how much she would miss this light jingling of spurs, the kiss on the hand, the admiration these soldiers showed her almost in spite of themselves, soldiers who were without family, without female companionship. There was in their respect for her a hint of tender melancholy: it was as if, thanks to her, they could recapture some remnant of their former lives where kindness, a good education, politeness towards women had far more value than getting drunk or taking an enemy position. There was gratitude and nostalgia in their attitude towards her; she could sense it and was touched by it.”

This is a fine work, a time capsule of a fraught and crucial period. Journalism has been described as the first rough draft of history. Némirovsky’s novel has the persuasive integrity of good journalism, but the draft feels anything but rough. ( )

Very real characters. An unfinished novel... the story about the author is just as compelling as the story. ( )

Review to follow. ( )

Llibre anunciat al Rac1 i casualidad hi ha una película. ( )

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-Print: COPYRIGHT: April 11, 2006; PUBLISHER: Knopf; Translation edition; ISBN 978-1400044733; PAGES 416; Unabridged (Amazon Hardcover info)
-Digital: COPYRIGHT: April 11, 2006; PUBLISHER: Vintage; Translation edition; ISBN 1400044731; PAGES: 448; Unabridged (info from: Amazon: Kindle edition)
*Audio: COPYRIGHT: July 16, 2013; PUBLISHER: Random House Audio; DURATION: 13 hrs., 13 mins.; Unabridged (INFO FROM Amazon/Audible)
Feature Film or tv: Not that I’m aware of.

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-How I picked it: I can’t recall where I saw this that prompted me to get it with one of our credits from Audible. I tend to like books about France and WWII. 😊
-What’s it about? There are two stories. The first begins with a description of France and its citizens, before then zeroing in on a few of them who are reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that they must flee, as the Germans are invading. In fact, at this point, are right on their heels. It tells of the desperation of flight-of suddenly having nothing, and no means to remedy that; of classes of people crashing together in distrust and prejudice. The second story seems to be a continuation, after some passage of time, but only includes one family from the previous story, which had been much more incidental in that previous story. This family’s village is occupied and the family is forced to accommodate a German soldier resident, as have many other villagers—most of the citizens are farmers, but our primary family is a landowner (although with all of the unfamiliar French names, I got a little confused as to who was who at times.).
-Liked: I thought the stories were well plotted, and liked a couple of characters. I don’t think I was expected to like most of them.
-Disliked: I don’t care for tragic stories where nearly everyone is at one another’s throats.
-Overall: I understand that the author was actually Jewish. Irène Némirovsky was apparently a Ukrainian-born Russian living in France when she began working on these novellas, which apparently were parts 1 and 2, of what was intended to be 5 parts. She was, however captured by the Nazis with her husband (daughters, I believe were living elsewhere and thus, with the manuscript, survived) to Auschwitz, where she died. I read a review that complained that the author had not mentioned Jews in the stories. Given her situation, I personally wouldn’t fault her for that, and am less certain than the complainer that she’d excluded Jews from the tale. Perhaps they were there and just not identified as such.
So, I can imagine that these stories were born from her experience, and I can’t fault her for having so few honorable or truly good characters. One would like to think that people would come together in such dire times, to help one-another, but it’s probably more “normal” to fear for one’s own chances at survival, and be stingy, or greedy, on that premise. Still, personally, I don’t read books to find “normal” stingy greedy examples of the human race, so I just can’t say I liked these stories. I suspect the author may have intended to bring us around to happier conditions, and somehow rectify the dearth of likable characters, but as it stands, there’s just not enough of a sense of honor here for me.

AUTHOR: (From Wikipedia) “Irène Némirovsky (French: [iʁɛn nemiʁɔfski]; 11 February 1903 – 17 August 1942) was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism[1][2] – she was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.."
(From Goodreads/Penguin Random House) “Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a successful banking family. Trapped in Moscow by the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled first to a village in Finland, and eventually to France, where she attended the Sorbonne.
Irène Némirovsky achieved early success as a writer: her first novel, David Golder, published when she was twenty-six, was a sensation. By 1937 she had published nine further books and David Golder had been made into a film; she and her husband Michel Epstein, a bank executive, moved in fashionable social circles.
When the Germans occupied France in 1940, she moved with her husband and two small daughters, aged 5 and 13, from Paris to the comparative safety of Issy-L’Evêque. It was there that she secretly began writing Suite Française. Though her family had converted to Catholicism, she was arrested on 13 July, 1942, and interned in the concentration camp at Pithiviers. She died in Auschwitz in August of that year. --Penguin Random House”

TRANSLATOR: (From the Author’s Guild) “Sandra Smith was born and raised in New York City. As an undergraduate, she spent one year studying at the Sorbonne and fell in love with Paris. Immediately after finishing her B.A., she was accepted to do a Master’s Degree at New York University, in conjunction with the Sorbonne, and so lived in Paris for another year. She then moved to England, where she began teaching 20th Century French Literature, Modern French Drama and Translation at Cambridge University. She currently lives in the New York area and teaches at NYU and has given Master Classes at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia.
Sandra Smith is the translator of all 12 novels by Irène Némirovsky available in English, as well as a new translation of Camus’ "L’Etranger" ("The Outsider", Penguin UK, 2012). Her translation of Némirovsky’s "Suite Française" (2006) won the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, the first time that the same book has ever won both prizes in the same year. Suite Française also won the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year prize and was voted Book of the Year by The Times of London.
Smith’s translation of "The Necklace and Other Stories" by Guy de Maupassant was inspired by her belief that Maupassant was a master of the short story genre who should be discovered by English speaking readers.
Her translation of Marceline Loridan-Ivens' "But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir" won the National Jewish Book Award in 2017.
Six of Smith's translations have been adapted as radio plays on the BBC.
Her translation of a biography of Jacques Schiffrin was published by Columbia University Press early in 2019.
Her most recent translation are "The Prodigal Child" by Irène Némirovsky (Kales Press 2021), "Inseparable" by Simone de Beauvoir (Ecco Press/Harper Collins 2021), Finalist for the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for fiction, "In the Shadows of Paris" by Anne Sinclair (Kales Press 2021), Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and "Master of Souls" by Irène Némirovsky (Kales Press 2021).
She is currently working on the translation of Correspondence between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès (Knopf).”

NARRATOR: (from Wikipedia) “Daniel Oreskes is an American actor known for his roles in Law & Order, and Law & Order: Organized Crime. Oreskes has also appeared in numerous Broadway productions and narrates audiobooks.[1][2][3]
Oreskes graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.[4] He is the brother of academic Naomi Oreskes and former journalist Michael Oreskes.[5][6]”

NARRATOR: (from Wikipedia) “Barbara Rosenblat is a British actress. She is best known as a prolific narrator of audiobooks, for which AudioFile named her a Golden Voice.[1] She has also appeared on screen such as in the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black as the character Miss Rosa.”

GENRE:
Historical Fiction

SUBJECTS: (Not comprehensive)
France; World War II; War; Occupation: Refugees

LOCATIONS:
France

TIME FRAME:
1940’s

DEDICATION:
“I dedicate this novel to the memory of my mother and father, to my sister, Elisabeth Gille, to my children and grandchildren, and to everyone who has felt and continues to feel the tragedy of intolerance.” __Denise Epstein [daughter of Irene]

EXCERPT: (From Chapter One)
“Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The firs 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 men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn’t long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, “Is it an air raid?”

RATING:
3 stars

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
8-30-2023 to 9-11-2023 ( )