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Suite Francaise

Average rating: 4/5

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Suite Francaise

by Irene Nemirovsky

Knopf Canada | April 10, 2007 | Trade Paperback

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-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 Némirovsky'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 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.

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    Imagine you are living your life almost as you have always lived it, affected only by the reality that some of your country's young men have been called to serve in a war that is happening not all that far from your borders. Imagine then that the unthinkable happens and you learn that in a few short hours the enemy will be on your door step, fully intent on occupying your beloved city. You must evacuate - flee into the countryside with the few things you can carry in a desperate attempt to save your life and the lives of your loved ones. This isn't a story about Iraq - this is a story which begins in 1940 when Paris falls to the Germans.

    Suite Francaise is an extraordinary novel, with an equally extraordinary provenance. It was written by Irene Nemirovsky, a Russian émigré who achieved early acclaim as a young novelist in her adopted country. Having fled Russia with her parents to avoid the Russian Revolution, she is once again forced to flee when the Germans reach the outskirts of Paris. Along with so many Parisians, Nemirovsky, her husband and two daughters sought safety in the countryside. She began writing Suite Francaise during this period and continued to write until she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz where she died. The manuscript, which is Suite Francaise, was saved by her young daughter Denise who barely escaped arrest and carted her only link to her mother - a suitcase filled with writing - through the endless series of moves she was forced to make to evade capture and certain death. It took almost six decades for Denise to have the courage to open the suitcase and read her mother's words. In 2004, Editions Denoel finally published this exquisite novel where it was acclaimed to have "the kind of intimacy found in the diary of Anne Frank."

    Suite Francaise is filled with characters so memorable, so real, and so human, you can at once feel what it was like to live through this soul-destroying period. Haughty aristocrats beg for food and petrol from those who, a few weeks earlier, they wouldn't stoop to have as house servants; true patriots find themselves somehow attracted to, and having affairs with, German soldiers; Jews are hunted out for no reason other than that they are Jewish; and more than a few incredible souls demonstrate the kind of bravery and moral righteousness which allows us to have hope for the future of humankind.

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    Rating: 5/5

    A definite must read!

    Carolin Ireson

    13 months ago

    We're reading this as part of our book club. I went on 7 day Cruise and was surprised that I couldn't put it down. Totally would recommend.

    I wish there was more to tell us the outcome of all families mentioned. After I read the online summary, I realize that if the author hadn't died there was suppose to be more. Can't wait for book club.

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    Rating: 3/5

    Mixed Feelings

    Kristy

    3 years ago

    It wasn't great for me. Although Suite Francaise is highly acclaimed and one of Heather's Picks (which I normally love) it feel short in my opinion.

    The good: I liked how it showed the experience of a variety of French people during WW2 from different social levels. Many books only focus on the tragedies of persecuted peoples or soliders, but this novel tells stories of average French citizens and their experiences up to and during the German occupation.

    The bad: I found it hard to read as it was long and the characters have very little to do with each other. It felt like a rough draft of a novel and I wonder how much would have been changed/edited if Nemirovsky would have survived the war.

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    Rating: 5/5

    Amazing

    Impossible

    3 years ago

    All I can say is that this book is amazing. I would describe it more, but there aren't enough words good enough in the English language to tell you how great this books was. I loved it!

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Details

From the Publisher

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-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 Némirovsky'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 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.

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-L'Evêque. 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.

Bookclub 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 Némirovsky's 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 Montmort's 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 man's 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 Némirovsky's 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?

Trade Paperback

448 Pages, 5.24 x 7.91 x 0.98 in

April 10, 2007

Knopf Canada

English


0676977715
9780676977714

From the Critics

Winner of France's Prix Renaudot 2004

#1 Bestseller in France

Praise for Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française:
"If you read only one piece of fiction this year, read Irène Némirovsky's miraculous last novel. Suite Française is miraculous for the power, brilliance and beauty of the writing, and for the very wholeness of the work, despite its being less than half the 1,000 pages its author intended. . . . Némirovsky's novel speaks as resonantly today as it would have had it been published in the year of her death: It is a stunning denunciation of the hypocrisy and greed of the ruling elites who make, but never seem to suffer from, war."
-The Globe and Mail

"A uniquely resonant picture of France defeated and occupied, a book of exceptional literary quality - it has the kind of intimacy found the diary of Anne Frank."
-Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"An heroic attempt to write a nightmare in which the author is actually embedded."
-Anita Brookner, The Spectator (UK)

"An exceptionally forceful and frank testimony. . . . Like The Diary of Anne Frank, Suite Française is a real find; it excels both from a literary and historical perspective. A masterpiece."
-L'Express (France)

"Remarkable as the story of the publication of Suite Française is, it will finally be of anecdotal interest compared with the importance of the book. Here is the work of a fine novelist at the top of her form, writing about the fate of her adopted country with a pitiless clarity."
-Evening Standard (UK)

"Némirovsky sees right to the core of things… Her biting sentences give no respite to her characters…. There are scenes that are fearlessly described in the most vividly real terms."
-Journal du Dimanche (France)

"Suite Française is not about the Nazi anti-Semitic abomination, but about whatever is low in human nature in general…. Némirovsky's maturity as a writer, her harsh vision of humanity, her utter lack of sentimentalism or politically correct humanism combine in a book that is vigorously disturbing."
-Le Monde (France)

"Superb… Its bee-hive structure, its finely tuned sense of what is laughable, its eye-burning imagery, are hugely arresting. Readers are whisked on a flight through social classes, genders and generations."
-Le Point (France)

"Such a book is hard to find in French literature…. An absolutely necessary rediscovery."
-Lire (France)


From the Hardcover edition.

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