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469 of 499 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Masterpiece, April 21, 2006
Having read much history about the 1940 fall of France, including such indispensible first person accounts as Bloch's "Strange Defeat," I have read nothing that captures the human experience of that debacle (arguably any debacle) as immediate and gripping as Ir?ne N?mirovsky's two novellas, all that was completed of what would have been the five part "Suite Fran?aise" (her title). Characters are as real as people we know well. They are vividly and deeply etched, with a focus and an economy of utterance that belie how engrained they become in the reader's mind. Without a central narrator, through the depiction of lives that in some cases are interlocking, in others tangential, indeed in most merely coeval, the feel of a world in dissolution has never been so effectively conveyed, both the general maelstrom and the personal experience. Transcending its time and place, it reminds us today how transitory everything is, how off-kilter, unbalanced, insecure life can suddenly become, indeed of the fragility of our existence, of how supporting structures such as class, belief, position, employ, wealth, can be swept away by happenstance or a tide of events we do not fully understand or foresee. When all material support is gone, all the characters (we) have left is what they (we) find within. For some, it's emptiness and pretension which always engender brutishness. Others are surprised by habits and qualities they took for granted or were not even aware they had: integrity, empathy, resourcefulness, even the grace and generosity inherent in good manners. Riches indeed. Ironically, the novelist as well as we, have always known that brutishness is not always punished nor does virtue always heal.
This novel speaks to the heart directly and, through the heart, to the intellect. The writing is thorough and gripping, detail is probed and embelished only when necessary. Some have described N?mirovsky's writing as Proustian. I think this is so only to the extent that the emerging picture is so flavorful and complete. The writing is always flowing yet compact; I don't recall a sentence which, unlike in Proust, could be remotely described as rococo. Though the events and composition are more than half a century removed from our time, the feel is oddly contemporary, the narrative's impact immediate and timeless.
The first novella has to do with the flight from Paris and the French defeat; the second, with life in a village under the occupation. But, of course, this is as adequate as saying that "War and Peace" is about Russia and Napoleon.
Read this book and be moved.
Recommendation: skip the introduction and don't browse the appendices first. Read the novel without concerning yourself with provenance. Afterwards by all means do read everything else. You will realize what a truly remarkable person wrote the gripping masterpiece you have just read, and the love and dedication by the author, her daughters and relevant others that ultimately brought this book into being. But, it must be emphasized: the greatness of "Suite Fran?aise" lies in the work, not in the circumstances of its provenance.
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318 of 338 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A timeless classic for today, March 17, 2006
I think this is a wonderful book, so moving and beautifully written that you realize after only a few pages, that you are reading a timeless classic, something that
will endure for ever in the same way as the great works of Tolstoy or
Flaubert. Actually the author has all the lyricism of Tolstoy - and the
breadth of vision - but doesn't hammer on about her 'message' as he can do.
Think of those passages in Anna Karenina where the great man begins to
describe Levin and the ideal life in the country. There is none of this in
Suite Francaise. And the wonder of it is that you don't realize the author
was a Jew living life on borrowed time , exiled to the French countryside and
with the full knowledge of what this invasion meant for her personally and
her family. There is no fear in the book. It is essentially and creatively
feminine. That Irene Nemirovsky was about to be taken and killed , that she was a
Jew in the middle of a European abomination , this never intrudes. You
don't read the book for what the author suffered, despite her knowledge of
her own personal perilous position, she just lets her art take over so what
we get is a timeless brilliant classic which is so much more of an amazing
legacy to her and those who died than any personalized or angled account
could ever have been. What real heroism to do this, what an achievement, to
rise about the fear and humiliation and write this wonderful work. And the
translation is fantastic just because we don't notice it specially. Sandra
Smith ( translators like editors are surely born to live in the shadows )
has done a fabulous job in not making the book seem at all foreign. There
are no jarring phrases and odd distracting foreignisms that often get in
the way of really enjoying a great work like this . Of course we are
reading Irene Nemirovsky but every word on the page is Smith's and they are
all beautifully chosen to match the lyricism of the original. This is one
of the most important books to emerge for years and, it sounds rather
plangent but a triumph of life and art over the forces of death and
ignorance.
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94 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bonjour tristesse !, November 29, 2006
This novel bridges the divide between fact and fiction and as such is just my cup of tea. Irène Némirovsky, a successful Russian born novelist, was living in Paris at the start of the second world war - 1939. Although of Jewish parentage, she was in fact a Catholic, married and with two small children. By 1940 it was clear that France would be overthrown and Paris would be occupied by the Nazis. The Parisienne, and particularly the Jewish citizens of Paris, on hearing the guns of war outside their city, then proceeded by the thousands, to flee, and make for the rural communities of France hoping to avoid the wrath of the Nazis. In the case of the Jews, it was in order to save their lives. Némirovsky and her family fled to a small town in central France and she began to write the first of what she planned to be a series of four or five stories about the French experience during the war. She had completed her drafts of the first two of these, when she was discovered by the German SS and sent immediately to a concentration camp. Within a month, at the age of 39, she was executed. After a relatively short time her husband suffered the same fate. The children were taken by a friend and hidden from the Nazis for the duration of the war, and survived. They took their Mother's manuscript into hiding with them and some 60 years later, it was taken by Némirovsky's daughter, Denise Epstein to a publisher. It was published first in France, where it has already been very successful, and with a fine translation by Sandra Smith, now in English. The first of the two stories, "Storm in June" tells of the mass, panic exodus at the eleventh hour from Paris, where families, some of them used to a life of luxury, and most used to a degree of comfort and pleasure, were thrown into a situation where they had no control over their circumstances, and where real friends were distinguished from the fair-weather kind. Some of them found tolerable accommodation, some eventually returned to Paris, and some died under the guns of German fighter planes. The second story, is titled "Dolce" and it continues from the first in telling of life for the evacuees in a small rural village, occupied by German soldiers. Some of the French accommodated themselves to the soldiers and adapted a lifestyle in spite of them, some never accepted their presence, some resisted, some collaborated and some died. These are not great stories, but they are told with a sensitivity which could only come from the pen of a very good writer. Unfortunately, she never had the opportunity to review and polish them and the translator has faithfully translated leaving what errors there may be in place. There are two appendices in the book, the first containing the author's notes, the second contains her correspondence at the time. They add a considerable measure of poignancy to the stories, and in fact, I recommend that you read them first. It is a wonderful story, hailed in Europe as a French "Anne Frank". I heartily recommend it to you.
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