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Published on 5/7/08
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Suite Française won France’s prestigious Renaudot prize in 2004, more than 60 years after it was written. Its Jewish author, Irène Némirovsky, converted to Catholicism in 1939, but she still had to flee Paris with her husband and two young daughters when the Germans invaded. They found refuge in the small town of Issy-l’Evêque, where she wrote Suite Française, which collects the first two stand-alone novellas of a planned five-book project. The girls held on to the manuscript after their mother was whisked off to Auschwitz, where she was gassed in 1942. Decades later, one of them transcribed the handwritten book and got it published.
Suite Française is nothing less than a devastating achievement. In the first novella, A Storm in June, Némirovsky uses a quasijournalistic tone to retell the exodus of 1940 through the eyes of fleeing French people—white-collar employees, a fabulously egotistical writer and members of a wealthy family. Then, in Dolce, she zeroes in on an occupied village, particularly on the relationship between a French woman whose husband is a prisoner of war and the German officer who takes up residence in her house.
Throughout, Némirovsky unsparingly describes a cowardly country ravaged by petty concerns in the face of occupation. Eschewing both self-pity and self-aggrandization, she subtly shows that many French people collaborated with the Germans by simply taking the path of least resistance (pun intended). She also explains how seemingly tiny decisions can have tragic consequences during a national crisis. Némirovsky herself got lost in the wartime chaos: The book’s appendix collects letters chronicling the frantic efforts of her husband, publisher and friends to find her after she was deported. That she left such as brilliant account of a country’s downfall lessens the horror only a little.—Elisabeth Vincentelli
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