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Binding: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9781598870206
Edition: Unabridged
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
ISBN: 1598870203
Label: Highbridge Audio
Manufacturer: Highbridge Audio
Number Of Items: 1
Publication Date: April 06, 2006
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Studio: Highbridge Audio
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Irène Némirovsky was arrested soon after completing the second part of Suite Française. Ten days later, on August 17, 1942, she died of typhus in Auschwitz- Birkenau. Her husband, Michel, perished in a gas chamber on November 6. Their daughters, Denise and Elizabeth, survived, hidden in safe houses and convents, carrying a suitcase packed with clothes, photographs, and their mothers manuscript written in tiny letters to save paper. For years, both girls thought it was a journal and couldnt bear to read it. Then, in the late 1980s, Denise began transcribing it with the help of a magnifying glass.
Part One, "A Storm in June," is set in the chaos and mayhem of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Part Two, "Dolce," opens in the provincial town of Bussy during the first influx of German soldiers. Each part features a rich cast of characters people who never should have met, but come to form ambiguous relationships as they are forced to endure circumstances beyond their control.
Average Rating: 
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Gorgeous, stunning, heartbreaking book. I am absolutely ravished by Nemirovsky's prose. Her descriptions have the power of hallucination. Here are my favorite passages:
1. An old man who has been left behind (inadvertently) in Paris by his family, in their frantic flight from the city, is found and taken to a convalescent home run by nuns. He is dying and sinks into delirium. He dictates his will to a notary, with two nuns, a gardener, and the gardener's three sons as witnesses. His death takes him by surprise (it is like squeezing into a narrow door)
2. Philippe, a priest who has taken charge of a group of teen-aged orphans, flees with them from the city and wanders the countryside. They encounter an abandoned village. He directs the boys to eat their fill of strawberries. He pretends there will be a grand dessert waiting for them at the end of the day. He realizes he doesn't want to be burdened with the boys, and chastises himself for his lack of kindness.
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This book was written by a woman as she lived during the time it took place. Interesting, obviously, to read about the resulting chaos, and eventually, life settling down to a "new normal" as the Germans occupied France. I found the Appendices amazing - to read the author's own letters, and letters and information from her family after she was taken away. It lends such credence to the book; one knows that the historical information is factual - that just the characters are fictional, that what happened in this novel was really happening during the occupation of France. What a treasure - to have found her manuscripts after so many years.
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Suite Francaise is unfinished so I can't judge it as I would a completed novel. Author Irene Nemirovsky envisioned a story in five parts but only two were finished before she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died in August 1942. I began this book as a "pleasure" read but within a few pages was reading as a professional. In part that's because much of my first novel, Alliances, takes place in France in 1944 and 1945. More important was the fact that Nemirovsky wrote her novel as the events depicted unfolded and before the postwar mythology that colors our current vision had taken hold. Finally, she left notes that suggest how the missing three parts might have unfolded and show her imagination at work. For all of those reasons, I read this story as a novelist and found it fascinating. She introduces a broad cross section of French society in Storm in June, her depiction of the flight from Paris as the German army advanced in the spring of 1940. (The same events were dramatized in the French film Bon Voyage in 2003, a year before Suite was published in France.) Her take is picaresque, even comic at times, but underscores one fact that's often overlooked: the French had been there and done that twice before -- in 1914 and 1870 -- and ghosts of those earlier wars haunted civilians in 1940. The second part, Dolce, focuses on several characters introduced in Storm whose quiet lives in a rural village are disrupted by the arrival of German occupiers. Writing as events unfolded, Nemirovsky depicts neither heroes nor villains but real people struggling to survive, believable characters whose human strengths and weaknesses propel them into actions and reactions that have life-changing consequences. Among the real people struggling to survive was Nemirovsky herself, along with her husband and two young daughters, yet her writing isn't tinged with bitterness. The French aren't noble and the Germans aren't beasts, but her plans for the next section of the novel -- Captivity -- suggest that Nemirovsky sensed what was coming. The story stops in June 1941, just after the German invasion of Russia but before the rise of the Resistance in France and the Final Solution in Germany. When Nemirovsky died, France lost a very great writer and world literature lost a gripping testament of the bloodiest war in human history.
[...]
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This is a wonderful, courageous account of the experiences of Jews and other minorities during the war in France,
Please read it !
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History frequently suprises us. The best History books can give us a clear idea of the theater of war: what politicians decided, what strategists did, what happened during operations, and the tactics of armies. But none of those books tells us what happened to individuals, to each person who suffered the brutality of impersonal forces which destroy lives and minds. In this joke of Fate, this jewel saved by a miracle, Irene Nemirovsky tells us the story of a number of people during the Nazi occupation of France in 1940. It is divided in two parts, who would have been followed by several others. In the first of them, we are presented with a wide variety of characters, of every walk of life, fleeing south from Paris when the German Army arrives. Everybody suffers: nobles, bourgeois, common workers, as well as the disposessed. Let's say the first part is a vast panorama of the human experience. In the second, the author takes her microscope and focuses on a little town, Bussy. The Nazis have arrived and occupied the town. Each officer forces his way into a particular house of the locality. In certain house where the richest bourgeois live, there are only two women plus the servants: old Madame Angellier and her daughter-in-law Lucille. Officer Bruno von Falk is their "guest". The man of the house, Gaston, is a prisoner in Germany, and naturally his mother hates everything German. Soon conflict ensues, and characters get into profound moral dilemmas. Nemirovsky didn't write a political novel, nor an ideological pamphlet. She depicts people as people, not as representatives of nation, ideology, or class. Simple people, wishing to live life according to their preferences, suddenly swept away by a madness invented by stupid lunatics, yes, but also supported by prejudice and envy and hatred.
After you finish the novel, be sure to read the introduction, which tells the wonderful and tragic story of the book itslef, and the miracle of its survival. Many readers are grateful for it.
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