Amazing… spectacular… breath-taking… monumental… no, I give up.  I just can’t think of enough superlatives to describe Suite Francaise.  Irene Nemirovsky’s final work is, even in its unfinished form, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.  I’d feel that way even if I didn’t know the author’s remarkable story, but having some context in which to place the book makes it that much more marvelous.

Irene Nemirovsky intended Suite Francaise to be a literary symphony composed of five novellas and modeled after Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  Tragically, she was only able to complete two of her intended five parts – and those in rough draft form, although rarely have I met a more polished draft.  Before she was able to complete her masterwork, Nemirovsky, a Ukranian-born Jew living in France, was arrested by the Nazis and died in Auschwitz.  She wrote the first two sections of her work as she was living them – the first part, “Storm in June,” depicts the June 1940 Paris evacuation, in which Nemirovsky and her family took part.  The second novella, “Dolce,” concerns life in a small French village under Nazi occupation.  Both novellas start quietly and build up to dramatic conclusions.  The truly remarkable thing about “Suite Francaise” is that Nemirovsky “held a mirror up to France,” as the French prologue reads, showing life in wartime France with great empathy but without glossing over truth.  Many of the characters are unsympathetic, yes.  But that’s reality.  In a crisis, we’d all like to think that we’d be heroes and heroines, but the fact of the matter is that heroics are often cast aside in favor of the rather stronger self-preservation instinct.  Nemirovsky tells it like it is, but somehow without judging her characters.  And the reader understands that as much as we might want to judge Madame Pericand, Corte, Hubert or any of the other characters, odds are we’d behave in exactly the same way in their position.

Nemirovksy’s extraordinary empathy even extends to the German soldiers in “Dolce,” some of whom she portrays as cruel, but others of whom she depicts as young, talented, with their lives and potentials tragically wasted by a war they did not start and in which they are only doing a job.  The fact that Nemirovsky was able to find the grace to not judge German soldiers as a group and to, instead, portray them as individuals and not a collective, many-headed monster, is incredible.  In her position, hearing the rumors of concentration camps and struggling to hide my family, I certainly would not be so generous.  That’s what makes Suite Francaise so amazing – Irene Nemirovsky lived in the pages of her book, yet somehow remains above it all, dealing with her characters fairly, honestly, and kindly even when she is eviscerating them for their human failings.

The third part of the book helps to place Nemirovsky’s work in context with the times.  It presents her plans for the three remaining novellas, which she was never able to write, as well as her correspondence prior to her arrest and her husband’s correspondence in his attempt to have her returned to her family after she was stolen from them.  The book concludes with the prologue from the French edition, which explains the historical significance of the book and the story of its publication: Nemirovsky’s ten-year-old daughter took the manuscript with her into hiding and kept it for sixty-four years before she was able to bring herself to read it.  She believed it was a diary, but when she finally opened the book and realized it was an unfinished masterwork, she published it immediately.  As a result, we have a ten-year-old with extraordinary presence of mind to thank for preserving one of the most important pieces of French literature.  It’s tragic that this book ever had occasion to be written, but it is transcendent in its beauty.

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