War

Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn't sleep--the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?"

The women, more anxious, more alert, were already up, although some of them, after closing the windows and shutters, went back to bed. The night before--Monday, 3 June--bombs had fallen on Paris for the first time since the beginning of the war. Yet everyone remained calm. Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced. "We don't understand what's happening," people said.

They had to dress their children by torchlight. Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: "Come on, don't be afraid, don't cry." An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multifaceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves. From above, it could be seen flowing along, as white as a river of milk. It guided the enemy planes, some people thought. Others said that couldn't be so. In truth, no one really knew anything. "I'm staying in bed," sleepy voices murmured, "I'm not scared." "All the same, it just takes one . . ." the more sensible replied.

Through the windows that ran along the service stairs in new apartment blocks, little flashes of light could be seen descending: the people living on the sixth floor were fleeing the upper storeys; they held their torches in front of them, in spite of the regulations. "Do you think I want to fall on my face on the stairs! Are you coming, Emile?" Everyone instinctively lowered their voices as if the enemy's eyes and ears were everywhere. One after another, doors slammed shut. In the poorer neighbourhoods there was always a crowd in the Métro, or the foul-smelling shelters. The wealthy simply went to sit with the concierge, straining to hear the shells bursting and the explosions that meant bombs were falling, their bodies as tense as frightened animals in dark woods as the hunter gets closer. Though the poor were just as afraid as the rich, and valued their lives just as much, they were more sheeplike: they needed one another, needed to link arms, to groan or laugh together.

Day was breaking. A silvery blue light slid over the cobblestones, over the parapets along the quayside, over the towers of Notre-Dame. Bags of sand were piled halfway up all the important monuments, encircling Carpeaux's dancers on the façade of the Opera House, silencing the Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe.

Still at some distance, great guns were firing; they drew nearer, and every window shuddered in reply. In hot rooms with...

 

 

"Stories about World War II seem to occur in black and white, all grainy and bleak. That makes the stunning novel Suite Française, about the German occupation of France, all the more remarkable. As the book opens and the Nazis approach the outskirts of Paris, the June skies are gorgeously bright; later, the narrative is rich with evocations of blossoms and trees heavy with fruit, of fragrant air and the sounds of birds--as well as a scene where a cat claws a bird to death and stabs its tiny heart. Lush beauty is the backdrop to dark events, and so is natural cruelty. The characters who populate this sweeping saga of violence and survival--and who exhibit far more self-interest than virtue--are described with the same gleaming precision. The author of Suite Française is one of the most fascinating literary figures you've never heard of--and her own tragic story only deepens the impact of her book . . . The [book's] first part, 'Storm in June,' depicts in brilliant detail the tumultuous exodus from Paris in the summer of 1940 . . . There are harrowing scenes on the roads jammed with refugees . . . The second part, 'Dolce,' is quieter, if no less ominous. Set in an occupied village, it delineates the tangled emotions of the conquered and the conquerors . . . Suite Française--gripping, clear-eyed and lyrical--doesn't seem incomplete. Yet as wonderful as it is, when you read Némirovsky's notes, included in an appendix, you see the scope of her ambition and you mourn. She was planning a kind of "War and Peace" for the 20th century and, tragically, she never saw how her story could end."

 

"Suite Française, written as Nazi tanks rolled across France, captures the chaos, fear, humiliation, and very occasionally, the courage of the French, as well as portraying the complex emotions that developed between occupier and occupied. The story behind this novel, and Némirovsky's own fate, make for a heart-breaking coda."

 

"Compelling, gripping . . . A brilliant portrait of French society in 1940 . . . It rivals the story of Anne Frank's diary, or the story of Albert Camus's novel The First Man . . . Suite Française raises fascinating questions about what matters in the experience of reading: content or context. The context of Suite Française is endlessly fascinating. Then there is the novel itself[:] a society novel [but] a great one, in the devastating tradition of Edith Wharton . . . [Némirovsky wrote] with supreme lucidity [and] expressed with great emotional precision her understanding of the country that betrayed her."

 

"What is so remarkable about Suite Française, apart from its artistic merit, is that it survived at all and has, at last, become available for us to read . . . [It] is an extraordinary work, an astonishing blend of fiction and fact, history and storytelling."

 

"Extraordinary, visceral, photo-sharp . . . Sometimes a book can throw wide open a door that has stood barely ajar for decades. [Suite Française] is one such book for me. [It] bears eloquent, complex testimony to a time and place that, for those who didn't live through it, defies easy understanding . . . Uncannily perceptive, astonishing."

 

"Transcendent, astonishing . . . Suite Française, which might be the last great fiction of the war, provides us with an intimate recounting of occupation, exodus and loss. [Its] staggering power is that it affirms the idea that art can offer a path to salvation . . . This might be the most moving novel I will ever read . . . Like Anne Frank, Irène Némirovsky was unaware of neither her circumstance nor the growing probability that she might not survive. And still, she writes to us."

 

"Beautifully restrained . . . [Némirovsky's] talent was quite considerable and her personal story rather moving and tragic . . . I don't know of a more striking recent case where biography and artistic accomplishment are so intertwined . . . Némirovsky left behind [a note] about how to compose the projected later volumes of this novel project: 'The most important and most interesting thing here is the following: the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life . . . must be described in detail.' This she did rather splendidly in the first two books."

 

"[Suite Française is] clearly the work of a novelist with an alert eye for self-deceit, a tender regard for the natural world, and a forlorn gift for describing the crumbling, sliding descent of an entire society into catastrophic disorder. There are many sustained scenes and sharply caught moments that no subsequent rewriting (had the author been given the opportunity) could have improved on."

 

"This is possibly the most devastating indictment of French manners and morals since Madame Bovary, as hypnotic as Proust at the biscuit tin, as gruelling as Genet on the prowl. Irène Némirovsky is, on this evidence, a novelist of the very first order, perceptive to a fault and sly in her emotional restraint."

 

"The history of the manuscript, and its survival, is remarkable enough. The authority of the novel, though, does not come from its history, but from its quality . . . The narrative is eloquent and glowing with life. Its tone reflects a deep understanding of human behaviour under pressure and a hard-won, often ironic composure in the face of violation . . . Even in its incomplete form Suite Française is one of those rare books that demands to be read."

 

"Suite Française clutches the heart, its warmth and intensity give as much pleasure as a work of overpowering genius."

 

"Against the odds, Suite Française has survived. It does so as a triumph of indomitability and a masterwork of literary accomplishment."

 

"A magnificent work that its readers will cherish for as long as they still care about the art of fiction or the history of Europe. Even more astonishing, given its heroically large themes and the desperate circumstances of its composition, this is no gloomy elegy but a scintillating panorama of a people in crisis--witty, satirical, romantic, waspish and gorgeously lyrical by turns. Every page shines both with a ravishing delight in the surfaces of life, and a profound empathy for the souls of its characters, that raises it to the rank of the Russian and French masters."