Title: Suite Francaise
Rating: 5 Stars
This novel is about living through the French Occupation during World War II. It was destined to be written in five parts. The first part describes several characters as they desperately flee Paris as the German army bears down upon the city. The second part is about a year later. The German army has occupied a French town. It features several characters, both French and German, as they try to make their way in this occupied world. The third part (which exists only as a plot outline), concerns the actions of the French Resistance and the German response to it. The fourth and fifth novels, named Battle and Peace, only exist as titles.
Why weren’t the five parts completed? Well, the author, Irene Nemirovsky, was of Ukrainian Jewish background. Although having been denied French citizenship, she was still living in France at the time of the Nazi invasion. Eventually, she was arrested as a Jew and was murdered at Auschwitz during the Holocaust at the age of 39.
Amazingly enough, she wrote the novel during all of this. Writing in microscopic handwriting, it was all written in one notebook. She and her daughter Denise managed to keep it concealed as they fled from one hiding place to another. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, Denise kept the notebook but never read it. She assumed that it consisted solely of painful memories that she did not want relived. More than fifty years later, as she was getting ready to donate her mother’s materials to a French archive, Denise began to decipher the microscopic handwriting.
Realizing that instead of a painful memoir that she had a World War II contemporaneous fictional novel, she set out to find a publisher. It was published in 2004, and by 2008, it has sold over two million copies.
This is just about the most intense novel creation backstory since John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces.
Knowing that backstory does overlay a deeper meaning onto the story. If I didn’t know the backstory, then I’m not sure that I would have given it my highest rating. However, understanding that what I’m reading is a first draft of a novel written by a writer living under the most dangerous of circumstances makes her achievement all the more breathtaking.
The first part centers around a large number of characters, each with their own attitude and response to the impending invasion of the Nazis. There are the Pericands, an upper class elite family used to having everything done for them by servants and looking down on everyone else. It’s up to the mother to try to shepherd her many children and decrepit stepfather to safety to a provincial town. Is it any wonder that at some point she forgot her stepfather? Gabriel Corte, a French intellectual, cannot believe what is happening. Also an elite, he cannot believe that society has sunk so far down in the chaos of the collapse that he’s not given the special favor that he’s always deserved. The Michauds, minor employees at a bank, are cast adrift as higher ups in the banks prioritize their own safety and comfort over those of their employees. Charles Langelet, an epicure, is full of beauty and appreciation of the finer things, but is not above trickery and thievery to get what he wants.
The second part contains characters from the town of Bussy. The locals are horrified that the Germans have chosen to garrison in their town. Even worse, some of the residents with nice homes have to share them with German officers. The main French character is Lucille Angellier. Fairly recently married, albeit unhappily, her husband has been captured and is a POW at some faraway German camp. She lives (again unhappily) with her mother in law. A German officer named Bruno lives with them. Madame Angellier holds the German in cold contempt. Lucille also wants to hate Bruno, but he is a sensitive man and a talented musician. Over the course of a year, the two of them grow ever so closer.
In the second part, you see how the relationships between occupier and occupied change over time. Even those that profess to despise the Germans secretly ask Lucille to procure favors for them from Bruno. Some townspeople see an opportunity to make money off of the Germans. With no young French men in town, inevitable relationships develop between young French women and young German men.
The second part ends with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Germans garrisoned at Bussy pack up and are being moved to the Eastern Front. As this gets underway in the last pages of the novel, there is a dark sense of foreboding. Even though Nemirovsky cannot know it (she dies in 1942), the Eastern Front will spell doom for all of these troops.
I can’t get over that what I’m reading is a first draft written under horrendous conditions. It truly is an amazing piece of literature.
dorkenstein 