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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky; translated from the French by Sandra Smith. Vintage Books, 2007. 403 pages; $15.00 (paperback); reading level: adult.
Némirovsky’s novel is accompanied by some fifty pages of notes. If you read only the novel itself, you will take up a panoramic, camera’s-eye view of Paris in June of 1940. You will watch, fascinated, as a host of characters flees the city in advance of the German invasion. You will follow an upper middle class family who sees “nothing human left in this miserable mob”; an arrogant banker and his mistress; an affectionate couple employed by the banker who agonize over the fate of their soldier son; an art collector who cares more about his collection than about the plight of the human beings around him; a writer “not made for this uncouth existence” as a refugee. All are thrown into the river of humanity flooding out of Paris in 1940. Then (still watching as if through the eye of a camera) you will move forward in time a year of so and zoom in on a small village occupied by the Germans. You will learn the fate of the bank employees’ son. You will love and hate the Germans. You will see humor and pettiness and nobility in both soldiers and villagers. You will enjoy the characters, the descriptions, and the human insights immensely. You will be richly rewarded if you read only the novel. But if you move on to the backstory contained in the appended notes your initial understanding of what you have just read will be completely upended. You will be stunned to learn that Némirovsky, a Catholic convert, was an ethnic Jew living in France and writing Suite Française in 1941 as she watched the German invasion and occupation in real time; that she died in Auschwitz in 1942 before she could complete the last three sections of her book; that the pages of her manuscript were carried in a suitcase, desperately, lovingly by her 10-year-old daughter from one hiding place to another until the war ended; that the daughter finally published her mother’s novel in France 65 years after Némirovsky’s death. There are, in a sense, two books to be read here. One is full of humor and beauty and cuts through human illusions like a razor; the second is ironic and exquisitely painful. Neither should be missed.