Each character, even the most secondary, is full enough to call an emotional response from the reader. This ranges across an epic spectrum, from sympathy to violent dislike. In one brief chapter, she can create more of an audience empathy for a prowling tomcat than writers like Paul Auster can manage for a lead character in 150 pages. And the pictures she conjures of French refugee landscapes, uneasy moods and uncertainty during the first years of the Second World War are eerily and amazingly real.
So much for the genius; from there, the poignancy. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt pointed out the monstrosity of loudly decrying how Nazism exiled Einstein while not acknowledging ‘it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.’
After one reads Suite Française, such moral holes don’t arise. While the pages are open, the writing precludes thinking of anything outside the book. When it’s closed, however, the deep frustration that Némirovsky was murdered before finishing it helps us understand some of the scope of what the world loses with every victim of war and ethnic violence. The book forces the reader to think of all the hopes, creativity and love that a population's casual evil and mindless genocidal bureaucracies can and do destroy, as though they were nothing at all - but we, the readers, know better; we have our hands on the proof.
Suite Française is published by Vintage Canada, and is available there through Random House Canada.
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.