Suite Francaise

- Blurb -

SUITE FRANQAISE has all the ingredients of a major bestseller: one of the few novels about occupied France, it is also one of the few novels by a Holocaust victim; the story behind its rediscovery is extraordinary; the life of the author is fascinating and moving; but, most importantly, it is a hugely compelling work of literature, elegantly, subtly and simply written, with astounding insight into the moral complexities of the human condition. Written during 1941 and 1942, when Irene Nemirovsky, her husband and two small daughters were living quietly in the French countryside, trying to avoid scrutiny for their Jewishness, Suite Frangaise comprises two parts of what might have been a four or five-part work had Irene not been taken to Auschwitz. She conceived of it as a symphony - or her War and Peace. In the first part she tells of the exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Bourgeois and working-class characters alike pack up their belongings and flee, forced to rub shoulders in traffic-jams on the crowded roads south, some behaving with dignity, others with nauseating selfishness. In part two we meet several of them again in a small French village where Nazi soldiers are billetted, and watch Lucille's story unfold as she tries to resist the attractions of the sensitive German, and takes the risk of defending a young farmer who joins the resistance. The intertwining stories of all these utterly engaging and vivid characters combine to produce a unique portrait of France at that time, and all the subtle callibrations between collaboration and resistance.