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Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
What may well be the best novel of the year was written more than sixty years ago. Reading SUITE FRANCAISE is like coming across a treasure in your grandparents' attic: one feels one has found something extraordinary, hidden away for decades, and one is the first to lay eyes on it -- and in this case, that is almost true.
The story behind SUITE FRANCAISE is as extraordinary as the work itself, but leave that for a moment.
SUITE FRANCAISE is the first two parts, actually standalone novellas, of an intended five-part work on occupied France. They are lucid and eloquent, written with an immediacy that makes them feel like reportage, which indeed they almost are: the author IRENE NEMIROVSKY was a Jew of Ukrainian extraction who was arrested on 13 July 1942 by French policemen as "a stateless person of Jewish descent". She died in Auschwitz five weeks later. The events Nemirovsky writes about, therefore, were only a few months or even weeks distant when she set them to paper. There was little time or opportunity to revise. She had no illusions about her fate: just two days before her arrest, she wrote to her editor "I have done a lot of writing. I suppose they will be posthumous works, but it helps pass the time."
If literature has the equivalent of a Monet, this must be it: something written as it is observed, before the light changes.
The first novella, "Storm in June", opens as the Germans are bearing down on Paris and tells of the families and individuals - rich, celebrated and quite ordinary -- caught up in the chaotic, mass exodus. The second, "Dolce", takes place in a provincial German-occupied village - based, certainly, on the village where Nemirovsky passed her last days.
One might have expected SUITE FRANCAISE to be a work of bitterness, or depair, or hatred, but it is none of these: "Dolce" is in particular of work of moral complexity, where a German officer might be a better match for Lucille Angellier than her bullying, philandering husband languishing in a German POW camp, where occupying soldiers might have more empathy with the villages than the local aristocracy. Often ironic or sarcastic, at other times deeply sympathetic, SUITE FRANCAISE tells the story -- many stories -- of collaboration, quiet heroism and lives under war and occupation. It must, in parts, make uncomfortable reading for the French.
Nemirovsky's husband wrote to Petain, the leader of Vichy France, offeringto take his wife's place in the labour camp. In October of 1942, he was himself arrested and sent directly to the gas chamber. Her notebook survived the War in the hands of Denise, one of her two daughters, who spent the rest of War in hiding. Denise couldn't bear to read them. Only decades later did she realize that the notebook contained a novel, which we, and everyone else, are reading for the first time.
The fall and occupation of France happened a long time ago and, for Asia, a long way away. But Asia had its own War, the aftermath of which still ripples through the region, affecting opinions, judgments and actions more than sixty years on. That War, like so many things, is often painted in black and white; Shan Sa's The Girl Who Played Go (interestingly, also published in French by a writer now living in France), is a reminder that occupation more often takes shades of gray. But Shan Sa didn't live through it. Nemirovsky did. SUITE FRANCAISE is not as distant, and far more relevant, than it might first appear.
Peter Gordon
13/05/2006
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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