Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2059 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Woman & Home
"Be enthralled by Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. A lost
masterpieces set in wartime France. Vivid and compelling"

Sunday Telegraph, rev'd by Katie Owen
"A powerful work, satirical yet humane, with a poignant awareness
of transient happiness"

Independent
`This miracle of a novel plucks tenderness from the heart of
tragedy.'

Customer Reviews

Not your average novel
I had read several reviews and deliberated before, finally, making my purchase. Simply to read this novel does not portray the entire experience. The characters in the book are convincingly real, but what I found surprising, was the way in which Irene depicted the occupying forces, not as brutes en masse, but as individuals, each capable of many acts of kindness and consideration.
Once read, it is vital to read the material in the appendices and to consider the times in which these people lived and their total helplessness, in a situation beyond their comprehension.
There are books which stay with you for a while, this one will stay with me forever!

Absence of hindsight lends extraordinary freshness
This book is so fresh and interesting because it was written during the war, without the benefit of hindsight. The world didn't know about the death camps at that time - the author may have suspected, or even known, that a terrible fate awaited her by the time she hid the manuscript, but while she was actually writing, the big story was the German invasion and France's defeat. The culmination of the Nazi "final solution", and the subsequent process of holocaust memorialization, was still in the future at that point.

So what we get is a description of France in the early part of the war that is startling in its immediacy precisely because it is not coloured by a knowledge of what occurred during the rest of the war. Do any other contemporary accounts achieve this admittedly accidental and ultimately extraordinarily sad effect? Today's readers know what happened. The author didn't.

Suite Francaise is fresh, surprising and heart-rending - and extremely interesting from a historical documentary standpoint. The writer ain't no JP Sartre - it's pretty absurd to compare her with him - but it's worth a read for the insights it brings. The shortcomings in plotting and structure are pretty irrelevant given the work's other strengths.

A masterpiece, a must- read for the present about the past
I think this is a wonderful book, so moving and beautifully written that you realize after only a few pages, that you are reading a timeless classic, something that will endure for ever in the same way as the great works of Tolstoy or Flaubert. Actually the author has all the lyricism of Tolstoy - and the breadth of vision - but doesn't hammer on about her 'message' as he can do. Think of those passages in Anna Karenina where the great man begins to describe Levin and the ideal life in the country. There is none of this in Suite Francaise. And the wonder of it is that you don't realize the author was Jew living life on borrowed time , exiled to the French countryside and with the full knowledge of what this invasion meant for her personally and her family. There is no fear in the book. It is essentially and creatively feminine. That Irene N. was about to be taken and killed , that she was a Jew in the middle of a European abomination , that never intrudes. You don't read the book for what the author suffered, despite her knowledge of her own personal perilous position, she just lets her art take over so what we get is a timeless brilliant classic which is so much more of an amazing legacy to her and those who died than any personalized or angled account could ever have been. What real heroism to do this, what an achievement, to rise about the fear and humiliation and write this wonderful work. And the translation is fantastic just because we don't notice it specially. Sandra Smith ( translators like editors are surely born to live in the shadows ) has done a fabulous job in not making the book seem at all foreign. There are no jarring phrases and odd distracting foreignisms that often get in the way of really enjoying a great work like this . Of course we are reading Irene Nemirovsky but every word on the page is Smith's and they are all beautifully chosen to match the lyricism of the original.
This is one of the most important books to emerge for years and, it sounds rather plangent but a triumph of life and art over he forces of death and ignorance.