Suite Française

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.

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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.