'Suite Française,' by Irène Némirovsky
As France Burned
Review by PAUL GRAY
Published: April 9, 2006
THIS stunning book contains two narratives, one fictional and the other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into being. "Suite Française" itself consists of two novellas portraying life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union. At the end of the volume, a series of appendices and a biographical sketch provide, among other things, information about the author of the novellas. Born in Ukraine, Irène Némirovsky had lived in France since 1919 and had established herself in her adopted country's literary community, publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed "Suite Française" in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17.
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Courtesy of Denise Epstein
Irène Némirovsky.
SUITE FRANÇAISE
By Irène Némirovsky. Translated by Sandra Smith.
395 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
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Parisians fleeing their city ahead of the invading Germans, June 1940.
The date of Némirovsky's death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of "Suite Française" almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done. In his astute cultural history, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell describes the invariable progression — from the hastily reactive to the serenely reflective — of writings about catastrophes: "The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as 'diary' or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible."
We can now see that Némirovsky achieved just such coherence and irony with an ex post facto view of, at most, a few months. In his defense, Fussell had not heard of "Suite Française," and neither had anyone else at the time, including Némirovsky's elder daughter, Denise, who saved the leatherbound notebook her mother had left behind but refused to read it, fearing it would simply renew old pains. (Her father, Michel Epstein, was sent to Auschwitz several months after her mother and was consigned immediately to the gas chamber.) Not until the late 1990's did Denise examine what her mother had written and discover, instead of a diary or journal, two complete novellas written in a microscopic hand, evidently to save scarce paper. Denise abandoned her plan to give the notebook to a French institute preserving personal documents from the war years and instead sent it to a publisher. "Suite Française" appeared in France in 2004 and became a best seller.
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the back story of "Suite Française" is irrelevant to the true business of criticism. But most readers don't view books from such Olympian heights, and neither, for that matter, do most critics. If they did, publishers' lists wouldn't be so crowded with literary histories and biographies, those chronicles of messy facts from which enduring art sometimes springs. In truth, "Suite Française" can stand up to the most rigorous and objective analysis, while a knowledge of its history heightens the wonder and awe of reading it. If that's a crime, let's just plead guilty and forge ahead.
"Storm in June," the first novella of "Suite Française," opens as German artillery thunders on the outskirts of Paris and those residents who have trouble sleeping in the unusually warm weather hear the sound of an air-raid siren: "To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky." (Thomas Pynchon also hadn't heard of "Suite Française" while he was writing "Gravity's Rainbow," but compare his opening sentence, set in London, a few years later, same war: "A screaming comes across the sky.") The bombardment resumes: "A shell was fired, now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument birds rose into the sky. Great black birds, rarely seen at other times, stretched out their pink-tinged wings." With the utmost narrative economy, sharp, scattered images coalesce into an atmosphere of dread.
Parisians wake up to the realization that nothing, particularly the gallant French Army they have read and heard so much about, stands between them and the Germans, and they decide, as one, to get out fast. To depict the widespread chaos that ensues — railroads hobbled by overcrowding or bombed tracks, shortages of gasoline and food — Némirovsky concentrates on a few individuals caught up in the collective panic.
While her husband, a government-appointed museum official, remains behind, Charlotte Péricand mobilizes four of her five children (her eldest son, Philippe, is a Roman Catholic priest), her senile father-in law and a retinue of servants into an escape party, burdened by as many possessions as she can salvage from her haut-bourgeois household. Gabriel Corte, a rich, successful and egotistical writer, views the loss of Paris as an insult to his refined sensibilities. On the road, stalled in the choking traffic, he complains to his mistress, "If events as painful as defeat and mass exodus cannot be dignified with some sort of nobility, some grandeur, then they shouldn't happen at all!" As usual, Némirovsky offers no comment on this burst of folly; she allows her characters the liberty to display themselves on their own, for better and worse.
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SUITE FRANÇAISE
By Irène Némirovsky. Translated by Sandra Smith.
395 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
Related
First Chapter: ‘Suite Française’ (April 9, 2006)
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Maurice and Jeanne Michaud, a middle-aged couple, both work in a bank that is moving its operations to Tours. Suitcases in hand, the Michauds learn from their employer at the last instant that the space he has promised them in his car, helping to transport bank records, has been pre-empted by his mistress and her dog. "Both of you must be in Tours the day after tomorrow at the latest," he tells them. "I must have all my staff." The Michauds laugh as they watch his car disappear; they expect little from life and so are rarely disappointed.
Finding the Paris train stations shut down, the Michauds set off on foot: "In spite of the exhaustion, the hunger, the fear, Maurice Michaud was not really unhappy. He had a unique way of thinking: he didn't consider himself that important; in his own eyes, he was not that rare and irreplaceable creature most people imagine when they think about themselves." The Michauds are moral beacons among the rampaging selfishness all around them. Their only concern is their son, Jean-Marie, a soldier whose unit is in the path of the advancing German Army. A few chapters later, it is a relief for readers to learn what the Michauds have not: Jean-Marie, wounded in a bombardment, is recuperating in a farmhouse near Vendôme.
"Storm in June" is a tour de force of narrative distillation, using a handful of people to represent a multitude. Némirovsky's shifts in tone and pace, sensitively rendered in Sandra Smith's graceful translation, are mesmerizing. There are lighthearted moments — one entire chapter is seen from the point of view of the Péricands' cat — followed by eruptions of terror, as when German planes strafe a mass of evacuees: "When the firing stopped, deep furrows were left in the crowd, like wheat after a storm when the fallen stems form close, deep trenches." And it all ends as the facts ordained. News of the armistice — that is, the French surrender — is greeted by the beleaguered homeless as an answered prayer. Survivors straggle back to Paris, where an occupying enemy and a harsh winter await them.
"Dolce," the second novella, displays none of the tumults of its predecessor. It is bucolic, becalmed. The French people have lost the outward war, and the battle has shifted to the inner arena of their consciences and souls. The Germans, who seemed as spectral as invading space aliens in "Storm in June," now appear in person. A garrison of Wehrmacht troops is billeted in the village of Bussy. The local men of fighting age are all gone, either dead or prisoners of war; only old people, women and children remain, and they greet the conquerors with sullen apprehension. Conditioned by years of propaganda to fear the bestial, rapacious Huns, the villagers aren't prepared for these actual soldiers, some barely older than boys. The intruders smile, behave deferentially to their helpless hosts and give candy to the children. Yearning for a return to normalcy and the familiar rhythms of their lives, the people of Bussy grudgingly adapt to the new reality.
Lucile Angellier lives with her widowed mother-in-law in Bussy's most elegant house. She doesn't regret the absence of her loutish, philandering husband, Gaston, who is in a German prison camp, although she hides her feelings from his mother, who regards him as a saint. Bruno von Falk, a German officer, has been assigned to live in the house. Lucile tries to treat the intruder with the same icy disdain displayed by her mother-in-law, but she finds herself warming to him in spite of herself. He is handsome, he plays the piano beautifully — he tells her he had hoped to be a musician before his military obligations intervened — and he has read Balzac. Night after night, Lucile grows more sensitive to Bruno's presence in the next-door bedroom, to the sounds of his pacing and to the ensuing silences suggesting his sleep.
Némirovsky deftly establishes the terms of this melodrama and its inevitable question — where will the attraction between Lucile and Bruno lead? — and then adds a dissonant note of reality. A local farmer has killed a German officer, and the fugitive's wife, who happens to be one of the women who nursed Jean-Marie Michaud back to health in "Storm in June," asks Lucile to hide her husband in the spacious Angellier house, which should be above suspicion because of its German boarder. The terms of the inevitable question alter significantly. Will Lucile choose love or honor?
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SUITE FRANÇAISE
By Irène Némirovsky. Translated by Sandra Smith.
395 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
Related
First Chapter: ‘Suite Française’ (April 9, 2006)
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
"Dolce" predates by nearly 30 years the explosive confessions of wartime collaboration in Marcel Ophuls's documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity," which French television declined to broadcast in 1970, even though it had partly paid for the project. Némirovsky recorded the best and worst of those times while living in them. Her novella ends as the occupying troops leave Bussy on their mission to Moscow: "Soon the road was empty. All that remained of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust."
But Némirovsky had more plans for "Suite Française," as an appendix to this volume makes clear. In her notebook, she sketched the possibility of a work in five parts. "Storm in June" and "Dolce" were to be followed by: "3. Captivity; 4. Battles?; 5. Peace?" The question marks punctuate Némirovsky's peculiar problem; she was trying to write a historical novel while the outcome of that history remained unknown. The fourth and fifth parts of the book "are in limbo," she observed, "and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens."
We now know what happened. Némirovsky lost her life in what she foresaw as "Captivity." The improbable survival of her two novellas is a cause for celebration and also for grief at another reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.
