Published 2004 / Length 342 pages
First conceived as a series of five segments, Suite Française comprises the two surviving sections of a book written by Irène Némirovsky in 1941–2 during the German occupation of France, just before her death in a concentration camp in 1942. The manuscript was kept by her daughter and rediscovered in 2004, when it received great acclaim for its portrayal of ordinary people coping with extraordinary events.
The first section, ‘Storm in June’, is set in 1940 as Parisians flee their city to avoid the Germans’ approach. The characters come from very different backgrounds and, despite their chaotic and desperate circumstances, they cannot overcome class barriers to work together. ‘Dolce’, the second section, is set under the Occupation a year later, as villagers struggle to share houses and break bread with those who may have harmed their loved ones. At once heartbreaking and shockingly straightforward, the book captures the resilience of the human spirit.
‘What I really enjoyed was all the small details. It’s true: the country might be at war, but you don’t forget stupid things like the time your neighbour wouldn’t let you have an egg.’ – EVELYN, 77
• ‘Suite’ can mean a group of rooms. Is this how we should see the two segments – as adjacent but essentially separate?
• How does the context (the background information about the circumstances in which the book was written) affect your reading of the book?
• ‘What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, but the way they hold their knife and fork.’ Does the novel prove or disprove Viscountess de Montmort’s theory?
• Némirovsky wrote nine novels, including David Golber (1929). These established her as a successful writer and her name became well known across Europe in her lifetime.
• Némirovsky was born into a wealthy Russian-Jewish family in 1903, but fled the country for France in 1918 after the Revolution. Her family lost most of their wealth during this time, but soon re-established themselves in Paris at the heart of upper-class society. Despite being persecuted by the Nazis for being Jewish, Némirovsky never practised any religion, openly socialized with anti-Semitic people and even converted to Catholicism in 1939, perhaps hoping to avoid detection.
• Suite Française won one of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Renaudot, in 2004.
• The Diary of a Young Girl by ANNE FRANK – another ‘found’ manuscript written while the author was hiding from the Nazis.
• If This Is a Man by PRIMO LEVI – describes life inside a concentration camp in an astute manner that echoes Némirovsky’s work.
• A Woman in Berlin, published anonymously – an intelligent, cultured woman’s account of the terrible summer of 1945 in Berlin.