SUITE FRANCAISE

Irene Nemirovsky (translated by Sandra Smith)

Reviewed by Robert Andersen

“Reread Tolstoy.”

This revealing entry appears in the author’s minutely inscribed notes of this gripping, if tragically truncated, novel. Irene Nemirovsky sought to admonish herself by invoking the Master, in the spring of 1942 - a year after she had embarked on her most ambitious work yet. This took the form of a veritable Russian novel that was to be Tolstoyan in length and scope.
As envisaged, Suite Francaise was to contain over one thousand pages divided into five interwoven ‘movements’, each of which would recount a salient episode of France’s ordeal during the Second World War.

Suite Francaise is a time capsule rescued from oblivion and brought to life, as if its author had only just put down her pen in briefly before tackling the third movement, ‘Captivity’ - the one she was to endure in the flesh, at Thierry and Birkenau. The defilement of France is sharply, unsparingly, brilliantly captured, in radiant prose that conveys the magnitude of its moral implosion. Here is the first great novel of the Second World War, written concurrently as an essential chronicle of a malevolent time. Indeed, a reckoning a brilliant novelist could pull off.

French in her sensibility but Russian in her provocation, Irene Nemirovsky marries the two as she focuses on the quotidian, the blank pages of history as it were, and conjures a host of emblematic characters of the rigid French class structure. And she makes it abundantly clear that it is this structure which was responsible for the “huge gulf” between the leadership caste and the people it betrayed.

She spares only a handful from her acerbic pen, one wielded with exemplary and often inspired irony and satire. “The historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.” That comedy is ‘noirish’.

Here is the upper middle class fleeing Paris, insisting on its comfort and ease as if it were leaving the city for the countryside on holiday. And, at the same time, is a small village nestled in the bountiful countryside, learning to accommodate itself to the German Army a little too readily.
The Exodus and The Occupation are rendered in exquisite detail. If the French are portrayed more often than not as base and servile, held to a higher standard as it were, the Germans (who billeted in her house in the village to which she had fled), ironically enough, are depicted as civilized and restrained.

The Wehrmacht behaved with extraordinary rectitude that first year of occupation, and the author captures the attendant fraternization in the love affair of a German lieutenantand the wife of a French prisoner of war. But it is a tragic love affair as the Germans depart the village for the Russian front and Bruno is nothing, if not everything, her husband was not.

The intimate level of the interstices of humanity in all its cupidity and nobility is rendered with extraordinary compassion. And it is portrayed in striking contrast to the exacting and withering judgment she was levying on the French nation as a whole. One wonders what she would have made of the Purge, and how she would have depicted its perfervid setting of scores. Marianne made queen of the revel, as Free France rallied to the tricolor and the myth of the Resistance enlisted a whole nation in its ranks.

This is very much a summer read, not only because the French countryside comes to glorious life in these pages (the reader readily conjures the author under a favorite tree, happily writing away oblivious to her imminent doom—see the entry for July 1942), but also because much of the narrative takes place in the warm months, especially June.

The pages, redacted by history, come alive in the aftermath of the here and now. We know what the author could only have imagined.  Their publication, after all these years, arrives as no small gift. Read Nemirovsky and weep that this remarkable 39-year-old woman never lived to raise her daughters and finish her magnum opus, a Russian novel (written in French) that fairly bids to stand on the same shelf as War And Peace itself. And read Nemirovsky, and rejoice that she was able to elude the French police after all, and deliver to posterity the proof of preeminent citizenship in the Republic of Letters.

Click here to read more about Irene Nemirovsky

With War And Peace her guide, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony her inspiration, this Russian-born Sorbonne-educated Parisian novelist, sought to portray - through ”indirection” - the craven trajectory France had elected in 1940 by jettisoning the Republic. Capitulation turned into collaboration and worse.

Much worse.

Nemirovsky, whose privileged biography animated her ‘French’ novels, now confronted in her ‘Russian’ one the debacle of a nation rife with ignominy and fratricide, moreover one “rejecting” her, turning her into a pariah, a Russian and a Jew.  

“Let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” Marianne was not so much in chains, as stripped naked, shorn of her hair, and paraded as a malignant example to be reviled and shunned.

The Republic commanded the allegiance of deserted streets. In rereading the Master, Nemirovsky could take solace in the implacable writ of history that could yet become the stuff of great literature.

  As she confided in her notebook: “I must create something great and stop wondering if there is any point.”

She had good reason to despair. Irene Nemirovsky never got beyond composing the first two movements; “Storm In June” and “Dolce”, because in August 1942 she was arrested by the French police and sent to her death in Auschwitz.

Her recurring premonition – in which she would not live to see her summa to its conclusion - came too suddenly true. Notwithstanding her impeccable gallicized credentials, including a conversion to Catholicism, Nemirovsky was deemed an alien and a Jew and as a result, subject to expulsion from the French nation.

Her disappearance (in late 1945 her fate would be ascertained), followed by that of her distraught husband Michel Epstein a few months later, left it to her two young daughters to convey her notebooks to posterity.

By a small miracle owing to the Church underground the girls eluded an unrelenting police dragnet. But the oldest daughter could not bear to read her mother’s work for decades and it was not until the late 1990s that a fluke occasion opened the pages to transcription, and a magnifying glass revealed that the start of a novel that could bear comparison to Tolstoy himself.