![]() ![]() Suite Française is narrated from the perspectives of a revolving cast of characters. Her daughter would later spend years painstakingly transcribing it. The second volume, written in Paris as paper was becoming scarce, is rumored to have been penned in tiny, almost illegible script. The juxtaposition of her tragic death at Auschwitz (she was thirty-nine) and the dramatic survival of her novel (which lived, unfinished, in the suitcases of her daughters, who were miraculously spared in the camps) lends an eerie authenticity to the work. In 1942, two volumes into her projected five-volume war novel, here gathered until the title of Suite Française, Némirovsky was arrested by the Nazis and deported. She emigrated to Paris during the Russian Revolution, and eventually became a successful writer there. Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev to a wealthy Jewish family. ![]() Most important, however, Suite Française feels significant because of the circumstances in which it was conceived, written, and published. Second, because it artfully balances the anguish (and verisimilitude) of any unsparing portrayal of war with the pretty, carefully wrought language of a good nineteenth-century novel. First, because of the scope of the fear it documents-that of French civilians on the eve of and during German occupation. Suite Francaise feels epic for a number of reasons. ![]()
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