BOOK REVIEW Book of the Month April 2006
SUITE FRANCAISE Irene Nemirovsky Chatto & Windus £16.99
The real life story behind the writing and publication of Suite Francaise is every bit as dramatic, human and haunting as the two excellent novellas that comprise the book. Irene Nemirovsky had been a successful Russian émigré author living and working in Paris prior to the German occupation. Her debut novel, ‘David Golder’, was an instant bestseller and in 1930 was turned into a successful film. Eight more novels and another film adaptation followed until Nemirovsky was forcibly stopped from publishing on the dictates of the German occupiers.
The first of the novellas within Suite Francaise, ‘Storm in June’, interweaves a dozen different storylines telling the tragic, farcical and ultimately hopeless flight of Parisians from the advancing German Army in June 1940. Nemirovsky is merciless in her depiction of the self-centeredness of the majority of her characters; they flee without dignity or humanity. She punctures their pomposity with needle sharp wit and exposes their hypocrisy with candid humour. Cars crammed with worthless valuables and invalid relatives block the arterial roads out of Paris before being abandoned as the fuel runs out. Reduced to walking, thousands of terrified refugees spread out into the countryside only to confront the retreating French army and advancing German troops.
Nemirovsky wrote these stories in 1941 having experienced, together with her husband and two daughters, the fall of Paris first hand. Barred from publishing, Nemirovsky continued to write, chronicling the traumatic events unfolding around her. So closely did her fictional narratives follow the fate of the Nemirovsky family that for decades after the war her daughters thought her leather-bound notebook contained private memoirs rather than a manuscript.
Like the characters from ‘Storm in June’ the Nemirovsky family was forced to flee Paris and in 1940 they settled in the relative safety of the village of Issy-L’Eveque, still in German occupied France. The second novella, ‘Dolce’ is set in just such a rural community under German occupation. ‘Storm in June’ described the national humiliation and the multiple losses for the individual during the shambolic and shameful capitulation of France; ‘Dolce’ deals head-on with collaboration. In both stories Irene Nemirovsky denounced cowardice and the acceptance of persecution but found hope and love in the most unlikely circumstances.
These two works were to be part of a five-volume set, however the real world interrupted Nemirovsky’s fictional accounts of the war one final time. Although Irene and husband Michel Epstein had converted to Catholicism, and the daughters were baptized, according to the previous French census they were classified as Jews – a status which determined their fate in Nazi occupied France.
Irene was arrested by French police on July 13th 1942 and was transported to Auschwitz the next day. She was registered at Birkenau extermination camp and died from typhus within the month. Unaware of his wife’s fate, Michel wrote to Marshal Petain asking to be taken in her place – the Vichy regime duly obliged and Michel was arrested, transported to Auschwitz and killed. The girls were aged five and thirteen.
Their governess removed the Jewish star from their clothes and smuggled them into a convent school under false names. The moral complexities intrinsic to surviving under occupation are infinite. The two daughters only survived because French citizens, strangers in the main, took risks on pain of death to save their lives. The French police tracked them down and they were forced to flee again and again. Somehow they survived the war and miraculously still had the manuscript for Suite Francaise in their possession, safe and intact.
This edition of Suite Francaise includes a preface outlining the salient events in Irene’s life and career, the outcome for her family, and the genesis of the work itself. There is an appendix transcribing Nemirovsky’s hand-written notes on the situation in France and her thoughts on her work. Together with the second appendix of correspondence between husband, wife, friends, publisher and the authorities, written as the net closed in, the whole work is an extraordinary reading experience.
Here is the fulcrum on which opinion swings. Disregarding the genesis of the novellas, do they excel in their own right as stand-alone works of art? Or does the provenance of the fiction lend it unearned kudos?
Nemirovsky employs powerful imagery and introduces a vibrant, varied cast of characters, the majority of whom she patently enjoys ridiculing. This gallery of morally-challenged collaborators and ordinary people living in extraordinary times navigates a series of sub-plots laced with coruscating wit and gallows humour. The French literary scene hailed the publication in France in 2004 as a ‘masterpiece’, ‘incomparable in French Literature’ and Irene Nemirovsky was awarded the Prix Renaudot. Acclaim this side of the Channel has been only a little more subdued.
A cynic might suggest that the French establishment is assuaging deep-seated guilt in embracing an author who chronicled collaboration with such a pitiless eye and also met her death at Birkenau, sent there by French police. It is easy to imagine Nemirovsky herself enjoying caricaturing the contemporary French literary establishment as it now embraces her so heartily having abandoned and betrayed her 60 years ago.
Excellent as they are, the stand-alone stories are not among the very best that French Literature has to offer but taken as a whole, Suite Francaise is a masterpiece. These works are inseparable from the life experience of their author. In ‘Storm in June’ Nemirovsky describes her most sympathetic character writing his experiences into a notebook in exactly the same manner in which Irene’s daughter remembers her mother. “He wrote with a chewed-up pencil stub, in a little notebook which he hid against his heart. He felt he had to hurry; something inside him was making him anxious, was knocking on an invisible door. By writing he opened that door; he gave life to something that wished to be born”. Nemirovsky had consciously entered herself into the body of her fiction, and told us so.
This edition of Suite Francaise must be read in its entirety; the translator’s notes, the preface, the novellas and the appendices. The complete book is inseparable from its provenance. As such Suite Francaise stands as the defining indictment of the twin wounds in the psyche of post-invasion France; capitulation and collaboration.
This review first appeared in its entirety in 'The Leamington Gazette' April 2006. The copyright remains the property of the Derwent Bookshop.
No comments:
Post a Comment