This is also an atypical World War II book in that it is strangely apolitical, and does not mention Jews or the Holocaust at all (especially strange given that the author was Jewish). And, while we all might want to think that we’d be one of the heroes in a time of crisis, the characters of Suite Française are too starkly, nakedly human for us not to have an immediate (and frequently unpleasant) sense of recognition and identification with them. It’s about ordinary people, behaving as ordinary people do – mean, selfish, petty, obsessed with class and status, confusing personal and nationalistic feelings, spiteful, resigned – people going about the business of surviving and living. On the battlefield, in the resistance, fighting the Nazis, saving the Jews most books are about ordinary people rising above themselves in times of crisis to do something extraordinary.

Review: Most, if not all, of the books I’ve read about war, focus around a hero, or at least a protagonist who does something heroic. German officers are being quartered in French homes, what scarce supplies there are have been requisitioned, and although the occupation may seem benign and even peaceful on a personal level, there are bitter tensions roiling under the surface. The second novella, Dolce, centers around the small town of Bussy during the period of German occupation. The story follows several groups – an upper-middle class family, a priest sheparding a group of orphans and delinquents, a writer and his mistress, and a couple of working-class bank employees – as they are forced to abandon their lives and possessions, and make their way towards the illusion of safety while basic transportation and infrastructure is being bombed by the Germans. The first novella, Storm in June, follows the fates of the refugees who are forced to flee from the German advance on Paris in June 1940. Summary: Suite Française is the first two novellas from an unfinished five-novella work – unfinished because Irène Némirovsky, a French Jew, was captured by the Germans in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died a month later. Genre: Not really historical fiction, since it was contemporary when it was written… I’d say somewhere between literary and historical fiction.

Read By: Daniel Oreskes & Barbara Rosenblat Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (originally written ~1941-2 published 2004)

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