Synopses & Reviews
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become
Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis
—shed begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovskys literary masterpiece
The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky began working on what would become Suite Francaise the first two parts of a planned five-part novel she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis she d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Nemirovsky s literary masterpiece
The first part, A Storm in June, opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, Dolce, we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
Suite Francaise is a singularly piercing evocation at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art."
About the Author
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a successful banking family. Trapped in Moscow by the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled first to a village in Finland, and eventually to France, where she attended the Sorbonne.
Irène Némirovsky achieved early success as a writer: her first novel, David Golder, published when she was twenty-six, was a sensation. By 1937 she had published nine further books and David Golder had been made into a film; she and her husband Michel Epstein, a bank executive, moved in fashionable social circles.
When the Germans occupied France in 1940, she moved with her husband and two small daughters, aged 5 and 13, from Paris to the comparative safety of Issy-LEvêque. It was there that she secretly began writing Suite Française. Though her family had converted to Catholicism, she was arrested on 13 July, 1942, and interned in the concentration camp at Pithiviers. She died in Auschwitz in August of that year.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reading Group Guide
1. Which of the two parts of
Suite Française do you prefer? Which structural organization did you find more effective: the short chapters and multiple focus of
Storm in June, or the more restricted approach of
Dolce?
2. What is the significance of the title Dolce?
3. “He recalled the cars full of officers running away with their beautiful yellow trunks and their painted women, civil servants abandoning their posts, panic-stricken politicians dropping files of secret papers along the road, young girls, who had diligently wept the day the armistice was being signed, being comforted in the arms of Germans. ‘And to think that no one will know, that there will be such a conspiracy of lies that all this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France.”
Storm in June, p.173
How does Suite Française undermine the long-held view of French resistance to the German occupation?
4. Discuss Irène Némirovskys approach to class in Suite Française. How do the rich, poor and the middle classes view one another? How do they help or hinder one another? Are the bonds of class or nationality closer to the front of their minds?
(You might consider the aristocratic Mme de Montmorts thought in Dolce: “What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, but the way they hold their knife and fork.”)
5. What is your overall view of Suite Française? Would you recommend it to others? Why, or why not?
6. In Dolce, the lovers question whether the needs of the individual or the community should take priority. Lucille imagines that “in five, or ten, or twenty years” this problem will have been replaced by others. To what extent, if at all, has this proved the case? Has Western society conclusively decided to privilege the individual over the group?
7. How does Suite Française compare to other novels of World War Two you have read? How would you compare it to the great personal documents of the war (for example, those written by Anne Frank and Victor Klemperer), or to fiction?
8. “Important events — whether serious, happy or unfortunate — do not change a mans soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows of all its leaves.” -Storm in June, p.203
Do you agree?
9. Consider Irène Némirovskys plan for the next part of Suite Française (in the appendix). What else do you think could happen to the characters?
10. What are your criticisms of Suite Française?