Suite Française

The last couple of years have begun for me with reading about the beginning of WWII. At the beginning of 2016 I read A. J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris about the fall of Paris (Liebling was there until a day or two before the Germans marched in) and the beginning of the war before the U. S. entered the European theater and the Germans began to be pushed back in North Africa.  At the beginning of this year I read Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, about Parisians fleeing the city just before the Germans marched in, and the people in provincial France coping with the occupation. These were two completed novels of a projected five that Némirovsky wrote in 1942, just before she was sent to Auschwitz, and which weren’t published until 2004. In the first novel, Storm in June, Némirovsky follows four groups of people as they attempt to get out of Paris and to what they hope is the safety of Nîmes, Tours, or Vichy. In the second novel, Dolce, she shows us the people in and around the village of Bussy: the local aristocracy, the families of the village, and the farmers, as they cope with German officers living in their houses. Némirovsky skewers the provincials and their stinginess, one farmer’s truculent, jealous and resentful nature, the haughtiness of the local aristocracy, and the minute hierarchical gradations among the bourgeoisie. She strikes me as owing more to Flaubert than to any Russian novelist. She delights in careful description, often, as in Flaubert, choosing the physical details that give insight into a venal, selfish, or weak character. Clarity and precise word choice, lyrical passages, but mostly lucid and simple storytelling characterize her writing. By 1942 Némirovsky had been a successful novelist for thirteen years and though writing in a tense and deteriorating situation, she got her adopted countrymen down on the page with grace and precision.