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   Summary and Book Reviews

Suite Francaise: Summary and book reviews of Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, plus links to an excerpt from Suite Francaise and a biography of Irene Nemirovsky.

Suite Francaise Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky
Hardcover: Apr 2006,
416 pages.
Paperback: Apr 2007,
448 pages.

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Critics' Opinion:   very good
Readers' Rating:  Five Stars
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Book Summary
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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 Nazisshe'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.

Book Reviews

Very Good BookBrowse
Suite Française is a devastatingly poignant work, made more so by the fact that the author was fully cognizant of her situation and correctly doubted that she would ever live to complete her book.
Full Review Members Only (members only, 945 words).


Very Good  Publisher's Weekly
Starred Review. This heroic work ......focus(es) —with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas.

Very Good  Kirkus Reviews
A valuable window into the past, and the human psyche.

Very Good  New York Times
She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.

Very Good  L'Express (France)
A work of exceptional force... remarkable because written not after, but during, the war.

Very Good  La Croix (Paris)
One of the great 20th century authors ... A gigantic literary and historical gift

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