When Irène Némirovsky started writing Suite Française,
she envisioned the novel to have five parts – a massive tome that would promise
to be her finest achievement; her tour de force.
Irène was a famous writer of her times already. But she was
also a Jew. And so, in 1942, she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. She
died a month later.
Before this unthinkably tragic end, Irène could only write the first two parts
of her novel. Her manuscript should’ve been lost but it miraculously survived,
preserved by her daughter as she successfully fled the Nazis. It still took
sixty-four years for the manuscript to finally see the light of public
attention. As possibly the first novel to be written about World War II, and
because of the way it was written – in Irène’s journal compressed into 140
pages written in a tiny font while she was hiding in the countryside somewhere
in Central France – it has since been widely acclaimed and was recently made
into a movie by the same name, in 2014. (The movie is good but doesn’t really
cover the intricacies of the novel.)
The copy of Suite Française that you can get now contains the first two
parts – Storm in June and Dolce – as well as an appendix that
contains Irène’s notes. These notes are morbidly fascinating, dealing with both
the novel and her initial exasperation followed by leaden dread at what was to
come.
The book was intended to be a story of a few individuals and their families in
France in the time of World War II as they experienced the incursion and
invasion of the German troops, followed by occupation, and was to chronicle
their struggles as they sought to hold on to their lives, their livelihoods,
and dignity.
Suite Française is an incredibly humane and compassionate story of France
in the midst of invasion. It also challenges the reader’s conception of the
individuals who comprised the conquered and, to a limited extent, the
conquerors.
(Despite the author’s own turmoil, it elides any mention of the Jews – I think
I could count only one or two instances where she even mentions the word.)
A short summary would be thus: it is a compelling book about inequality and
collaboration dealing with the turmoil of emotions in the minds of the
conquered as they find a way to survive, some choosing to compromise, others
torturing themselves through hope, and yet others simply forgetting their
circumstances. There are no modern twists and turns and yet the book is
gripping in its own way.
Below, I present a synopsis of the novel. I keep it separate because I know of
people who prefer not to know anything about the plot, and I respect
that.
************
The first part,
Storm in June, describes in vivid detail the Exodus of
Parisians from their beloved city as the German army reached their doorsteps.
In the midst of air raids and chaos, we follow a set of individuals from
different classes and professions as they prepare to leave.
We follow a prominent family, the Péricands; a famous writer and his partner; a
working class couple; a collector of antiques; and a few other well fleshed out
characters, as they deal with panic and desperation when fleeing from one place
to the other. Their lives occasionally intersect in the madness. Even in this
dog-eat-dog world we see moments of collaboration and cooperation. Kindness
shows up in the unlikeliest of places.
Némirovsky’s prose is unsparing as she provides a searing indictment of class
inequities. This anger spills out on occasion,
"But why are we always the ones who have to suffer?” she cried out in indignation. “Us and people like us? Ordinary people, the lower middle classes. If war is declared or the franc devalues, if there’s unemployment or a revolution, or any sort of crisis, the others manage to get through all right. We’re always the ones who are trampled! Why? What did we do? We’re paying for everybody else’s mistakes. Of course they’re not afraid of us. The workers fight back, the rich are powerful. We’re just sheep to the slaughter. I want to know why? What’s happening? I don’t understand. You’re a man, you should understand,” she said angrily to Maurice, no longer knowing whom to blame for the disaster they were facing. “Who’s wrong? Who’s right? Why Corbin? Why Jean-Marie? Why us?”
Ultimately their escape is futile – the Germans are
victorious and take over large parts of France. Storm in June ends here
and we segue to occupation, which forms the second part of the novel, Dolce.
If the first part was urban in its scope and concerns, Dolce is all about
pastoral life. We shift to a village far removed from the cities. Némirovsky
herself was situated in a village when she fled Paris and one wonders how much
of the content derives from her experience there.
With German occupation, invading troops were billeted with local families. This
meant the presence of a German soldier living in a house with no men, for most
French men were prisoners of war or killed in battle. The uncomfortableness of
this situation is clear – the women of the household had to tolerate the
presence of a person whose country was responsible for incarcerating or killing
their husbands and sons. The Germans were their overlords, and the women were
helpless. How they reacted and dealt with this intrusive occupation is an
important theme of the book.
But what strikes the reader is Irène’s ability to get into the minds of the
conquerors. Némirovsky’s lens is one of incredible humanity. She manages to
make the occupants somewhat human and allows the reader to imagine their
thoughts. This is remarkable. We follow, in particular, the strained
relationship between Lucile Angellier and Bruno von Falk, the former being the
daughter-in-law of a prominent land-owner in the village, the latter an officer,
a Nazi.
It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted,
contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous
events to be able to see it. It is the most fascinating and the most dreadful
of spectacles, she continued thinking, the most dreadful because it’s so real;
you can never pride yourself on truly knowing the sea unless you’ve seen it
both calm and in a storm. Only the person who has observed men and women at
times like this, she thought, can be said to know them. And to know themselves.
The book raises uncomfortable questions about the
compromises individuals made to survive. Even here, the privileges that the
aristocrats have over the farmers and working classes are glaring.
In the end, one cannot help but feel a great deal of regret in not seeing this
novel attain completion. The story ends on an exciting turn and sets up what
would have been the intertwining of the urban and the pastoral. We can only
wonder at what could’ve been.
