Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Review by The Quarterly Conversation
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I.

Suite Francaise is a novel that’s waited 60 years to be published. Scribbled in notebooks during the occupation of France in World War II, the novel was lost when its author, Irene Nemirovsky, was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Nemirovsky died a month later and for decades her notebooks–crammed with pages of tiny handwriting–were assumed by her daughters to be diaries. It was only in 2004 that “Suite Francaise” received its first printing.

Prior to Suite Francaise, Nemirovsky had published a dozen books that were good enough to bring her international renown. In 1936 the New York Times Book Review called her “one of our first-rank novelists,” and before the war Nemirosky was a bright star in Paris’s social firmament. She had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1939, but that wasn’t enough to grant her a reprieve from the occupying Nazis. Neither was the fact that during the occupation she published numerous stories (under various pseudonyms) in the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper “Gringoire.” Although she had the opportunity to escape to neutral Switzerland, Nemirovsky remained in occupied France where she was forced to wear the yellow star. We may never know why Nemirovsky chose to remain in France, and why she ran in anti-Semitic circles, but it is beyond doubt that her life was far from simple.

It is fitting that the story of Nemirovsky’s life is so complex because Suite Francaise is a novel of immense complexity. It was meant to be a five-book epic of occupied France, and although Nemirovsky only completed the first two books, she nevertheless captured the full panorama of French society through several effortlessly drawn, detailed characters.

The first book “Days in June” takes place in the week after the Nazis reached Paris and deals almost exclusively with the mass exodus from that city. The description is surprisingly similar to apocalyptic scenes in popular movies: the packed roads quickly become hopelessly gridlocked, mobs of refugees walk the 200 miles to Tours carrying what they can on their backs, and all the while German warplanes drop indiscriminate terror.

Within the first few pages of the book, Nemirovsky establishes that France was a society deeply fractured along class lines. When the wealthy matriarch of a large Parisian family allows her servants to listen to the grim war news on the radio with them, she worries that “such a breach of the normal rules seemed a frightening indication of things to come.”

Although classes weren’t meant to mix in ’40s France, Nemirovsky clearly transcended her social sphere. In “Days in June,” she inhabits the consciousness of a matriarch and her family, a wealthy, pompous author, middle-class bureaucrats, a hermit-like priest, a wounded soldier who is barely yet a man, and common servants. In short, potent chapters, the book moves quickly across several different plotlines, and Nemirovsky is so skilled at characterization that she needs little more than a paragraph to put us in a character’s mind. Take this example, where a young wounded soldier is taken in by a peasant family and cared for by two sisters:

He wondered if all the people here spoke like them or whether it was something much deeper, rooted in the very souls of these girls, in their youth, some instinct that told them that wars end and invaders leave, that even when distorted, even when mutilated, life goes on. His own mother, knitting while the soup was cooking, would sigh and say, ‘Nineteen-fourteen? That’s the year your father and I got married. We were miserable by the end of it, but very happy at the beginning.’ Even that bleak year was sweetened, bathed in the reflection of their love.

In the same way, he thought, the summer of 1940 would remain in the memories of these young women as the summer they were twenty, in spite of everything.”

“Days in June” is intriguing because the chaos of the exodus momentarily erased class boundaries. We watch as wealthy Parisians grow terrified because the unspoken rules of civilization are no longer there to protect them from the steerage, and we laugh cynically when those trampled-on commoners use their newfound freedom to enact tiny acts of vengeance. What comes through most of all is the humanity at the heart of the exodus: how quickly the people move from solidarity to self-interest.

II.

There was, of course, another alien element that the French had to deal with in addition to each other: namely Germans. If “Days in June” is the story of how the French acclimate themselves to the mixture of societal classes, then “Dolce,” the novel’s second book, is the story of how the French acclimate themselves to living with Germans.

“Dolce” begins after the fall of France, as Lucille and her mother-in-law prepare to meet a German officer who has been assigned to live with them. Notably, Lucille’s husband, the man of the house, is at war–perhaps captured, perhaps dead. At first Lucille finds the German strange and frightening, but as the town comes to accept their new occupiers the lonely wife falls in love. It’s a love that founders when the woman is asked to hide a town member who has murdered another German, and Nemirovsky masterfully bends this plot toward tragedy.

Incomplete as it is, Suite Francaise is brilliant, and it is likely that the completed five-book cycle would have been a masterpiece. It is nothing short of amazing that in 1942 Nemirovsky had enough perspective on the occupation to write so knowingly of it. Her strength is to explore the complexity in every one of her characters, imbuing them with life and finding the world in their personal thoughts.

But if Nemirovsky’s strength is complexity, then it is ironic that coverage of her own story has been so one-sided. Portraying her solely as a victim of the Holocaust, many reviewers have neglected to explain that Nemirovsky herself was a conflicted person. It’s a shame, because Nemirovsky is enhanced–not diminished–by a full account of her life. Likewise, Suite Francaise only becomes more interesting when we know the full extent of its author’s story.

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