Book Review
Stephanie Freas
Suite Française Némirovsky, Irène. New York: Random House, 2007. 448 pp.
aegis 2009 60 Freas
Irene Némirovsky’s Suite Française is about the unwritten aspects of war—the everyday moments, the romance, the struggle between survival and image, the dehumanization of even the most respected of classes, and the violence between civilians—rather than the expected military and political history that one may usually attribute to historical fiction. Although World War II’s events have sprung an entire genre of war and Holocaust fiction, this novel, or rather, collection of two novellas, is far from the expected reading of a Holocaust traumatic experience. Instead, Némirovsky surprises readers with a diverse cast of characters who fight to survive and hold on to any shred of humanity left in the most difficult experiences. By depicting how different humans may seem from one another, then throwing them in the torrents of war, Némirovsky illustrates the core qualities that tie humans together no matter how diverse their lives may seem. War causes a good man to murder, a married woman to fall in love with her captor, and a family to value one another more than any material luxury. Ironically enough, Némirovsky refrains from the subject of the Holocaust and refrains from including any Jewish characters when this very novel is interrupted and left unfinished by her capture and eventual death in the German concentration camp, Auschwitz. The manuscript ends in the midst of the German occupation and a romance between the second novella’s protagonist, Lucile, and her German captor. Here, we must ask how Némirovsky would end the story had she lived. One can only speculate from the struggle between the grotesque and the beautiful that the story would have ended with a saddening finale that would mirror the ways in which war truly ends in an occupied nation. Suite Française is set in the early 1940’s in France during the beginning of German occupation. After the French learn that the Germans are coming to each of their towns, they grab their most valuable items and flee for safety. In the first novella, “Storm in July,” each family searches for safe haven and its members must deal with their dramatically changing lives within only a few short weeks. After the initial invasion, many return home to find comfort, while others must create new identities for themselves. The second book, “Dolce,” concentrates on two families, one of which is introduced in “Storm in July.” In this complex novella, Némirovsky writes about the relations between the German and the French captives in one small village and hones in on the bond between Bruno, the German soldier, and Lucille, the French wife of an adulterous prisoner of war. “Dolce” ends with Bruno’s departure to another station in the war. Throughout Suite Française, the constant changing of the characters’ fates inflicts both horror and empathy. The text brings light to the small things in these characters’ lives that are so integral to their everyday survival, though many of their loved ones are missing
