Suite Francaise

By: Irene Nemirovsky

Narrated by: Daniel Oreskes, Barbara Rosenblat

By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece

The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.

Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

Beautiful

Irene Nemirovsky wrote these two closely observed novels about the chaos which was the evacuation of Paris before the Nazi occupation of the city and about the German occupation of a small French village. I say closely observed because she includes a multitude of small details which really allow one to enter the smells and sights of France 80 years ago. Her portrayal of the people and the gardens, the roadsides and the rooms, the scent of lime flowers as the German soldiers march out of the village, the strawberries as they enter the village, they are all true to life and bring the reader directly into Paris, the roadsides along the evacuation, and the village. Her observations of human nature are timeless. Her sympathetic portrayal of the occupying German soldiers is all the more poignant and moving as her death in a German concentration camp before she could complete the last three books planned in her suite hangs in the background of one’s reading of this book. The narration of both books is fantastic.

Really just couldn't get into it

I thought the book was almost over and looked and saw I was only halfway through and gave up. Just wasn't interesting enough for me.

Beautiful story

The historical facts coupled with the prose of the author made this a wonderful listen. The characters created helped give small glimpse at this part of history and the complex relationships that existed between the invaders and the local people.

Breathtaking prose

Inspiring story of respect in adverse circumstances. We are inclined to repudiate enemies, but maybe by erasing the enemies lines we could find, with time and effort, a place of mutual understanding, and just maybe we could transport into this place a new human experience.

German Occupation of France

I was sad about the story of World War Ii, but glad to know more about its history