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Irene Nemirovsky's last novel remains incomplete. She died in 1942, a short time after being deported to Auschwitz. Her daughters took the manuscript with them into hiding and, some 60 years later, sent it to the French publisher Denoel.
I surprised myself and actually read this book in English: since CanLit in College when Gabrielle Roy's Tin Flute lost entire paragraphs from the original Bonheur d'occasion, I haven't trusted translations from the French to English. But, it sat well with me that the title was left as is, in French. And then, reading it, I "heard" its closeness to the original...
This book has in it that recounting of how French social classes coped with invasion and occupation by Germany in 1940-41. The characters who represent these social classes are all generously endowed with points of view, up to and including Albert Péricand, an upper-middle-class family housecat.
I've listened, for decades, to my own mother's narratives of invasion (and deportation as opposed to occupation) and observations about social classes have always been both detailed and numerous. Further, these observations have always favoured the poor as being more resilient, and the rich pretty much going crazy. It all had to do with how much of your material assets you were losing...
So, when Nemirovsky spent much of her character development time at the task of observing social classes, I felt before I identified, that credibility that comes from familiarity. Certainly, her rich characters go crazy enough: one woman saves her 3 youngest children and their nanny, sews the money and jewelry into her blouse, and leaves the bombed village on foot. She forgets something behind, though: her father-in-law. As for her poor, their resilience is never better illustrated than when they steal from the rich and say, about them, "It's not that they're so bad. They just don't know about life." (...)
In the first part of this book, "Storm in June", Paris is evacuated and the reader follows activities of "leaving" which are poignantly incongruent with some characters' psychological make-up. Chapters are short, and stir up inquisitiveness in the reader, as well as enthusiasm for nurturing sympathy on behalf of these displaced people, their air raids and bombings.
In the second part, "Dolce", interactions between German soldiers and French villagers start out as tentatively hostile and move to tentatively amicable, lingering at every nuance of indifference imaginable.
The third part was to have been "Captivity". And the completed book would have had five parts to it, for a total of 1,000 pages. The book's appendix includes the author's notes to herself, and her outlines, reprising some of the characters encountered in "Storm" then abandoned in "Dolce". Too bad we don't have this. In fact, I think that because we're missing more than half the book, much must remain unresolved in the way of tensions, conflicts, loves, losses...
In and of themselves, Nemirovsky's appendix notes fascinate:
"War, yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to one another."
Wow.
Complex, unexpected, intricate dynamics in how characters relate. From the predictable to the shocking, all of it plausible, and none of it stereotypical...
Then, she writes, about 6 weeks before dying, "never forget that the war will be over...Try to create as much as possible: things, debates...that will interest people in 1952 or 2052."
What caught and kept my attention throughout, though, was that Irene Nemirovsky, a Jew, wrote Catholics as accurately as if she had been one herself.
I can only imagine what her take on the sixties might have been had she lived...
Suite Française
Irène Némirovsky
Translated by Sandra Smith
NY, Knopf, 2006
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Of all known institutions, I attend only two: church, in my heart, and school, in yours. Both are subject to demolition. - Lucie Adams, 2007
It is only for poetry to know how many stanzas fit into one caress. - Lucie Adams, 2008
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"Testament" by Nino Ricci
