Put this at the top of your "To Read" list | Suite Française

book: Suite Française | Irene Nemirovsky

books:


	• Suite Française Irene Nemirovsky Knopf, 2006 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 363 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

left me hungry to read more

I was transported back to war torn France and walked the dusty roads to the concentration camps with other prisoners or so it seemed. How lucky was I to be able to imagine and not recount from personal experience. The author has a story to tell and elegantly she succeeds allowing generations after her to know what it was like for people caught up in such madness. I took this book along with two others on holiday and settled down on the hot sands to read, I was unprepared for such a brilliant read. I must also recommend THE FATES, TIN0'S masterful novel his book captured my attention as diligently as Suite Francaise.

The Fates (classic)

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Put this at the top of your "To Read" list

"Suite Française" is one of the most amazing books I've read this year. The first part of the book, "Storm in June," depicts the lives of various characters as they struggle with the beginning of the Great War and the German invasion/occupation of Paris. All of the characters are equally fascinating, and the author distinguishes how people from opposite classes responded to the same situations. The second half of the book, "Dolce," revolves around the year-long German occupation of a small French village. This portion of the book details the story of a French woman who falls in love with a German officer, and also conspires to protect a fellow villager who is wanted for the murder of another German.

Irène Némirovsky was an amazing novelist. "Suite Française" is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. Every page is absolutely captivating, as are the numerous characters and vivid descriptions of these tragic events. What's even more amazing than this book is Némirovsky's own story: She was a Jewish, Russian immigrant who wrote this novel before she died at Auschwitz in 1942. Némirovsky's daughters possessed the "Suite Française" manuscript for more than 60 years without knowing what it was. Eventually, the book was discovered and became a bestseller in 2004, decades after Némirovsky's death.

I sincerely cannot say enough great things about this book. It's an amazing story about war and foreign occupation that, in a sad twist of irony, was written by a woman who would pay the ultimate price during that exact same period in history. "Suite Française" is a book that should definitely be read by everyone.

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By the early l940s, 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.

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