Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française is the best prose epic I’ve ever read, and it’s not even half-finished. She found a way to write sweeping vistas of a country at boiling and simmering points, exploding and settling with a cast of thousands, without sacrificing the personality of her characters. The two parts of the book that exist are written well enough to stand alone, but it’s frustrating to the point of tears that the other three she planned were never written.
Némirovsky’s composition of Suite Française was interrupted by her imprisonment and murder at Auschwitz. The manuscript survived her, and it was published some 50 years later, in 2004. It has received huge amounts of press since then because the instances of genius and poignancy combining in such a way are exceedingly rare.
Before Némirovsky’s career was cut off by France’s oppression of resident Jews, she had published several works of some success. But Suite Française, even in its unfinished form, was hailed on publication as evidence of a new talent and maturity. Certainly, it vastly surpasses her second most famous book, David Golder, a portrait of a merchant banker’s final days.
The excellence of the book is especially remarkable as the elements of her own situation as a stateless Jew in a country that had yielded to Nazism is never referred to in the narrative. In her notes for the book, she wrote of France: ‘My god! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.’ We do watch, but we would never know that the narrator of the vision was one of the victims of France's deterioration, or indeed that there were any victims like her.
And while her portraits of the French and German characters are far from universally negative, she does show us a shocking yet wholly believable decline, after France's military defeat, of what is held to be 'honour'. She employs the trick of defining the unbearable and the horrid by juxtaposing it with the luxurious or the noble. The result, while sometimes deeply sarcastic and bitter, is crystal clear sketches of situations and people.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Nice review, very expressive of the "Genius and poignancy" at heart.
2 - Melita Teale
Thanks, Gordon. The book was so good and her background so famous I didn't know if I should mention her tragedy that much, but it's an inescapable part of the reading experience at this point, I guess.