I was intrigued enough by David Frum's review of the Irene Nemirovsky novel, Suite Francaise to order it today, trusting I won't be disappointed. It's easy to see how, as Frum says, "the story of the recovery of this book is so dramatic and heart-rending that it almost overwhelms the book itself."
How could it not be so?
Irene Nemirovsky was born to a wealthy Jewish family in czarist Russia. The family fled to France after the communist revolution. Irene exploded into almost immediate success as a writer in her early 20s, publishing a series of successful novels. Alienated from her family - of all the horrible mothers in the canon in literature, Irene's frivolous and selfish mother ranks among the very worst - she and her husband, Daniel Epstein, and their two daughters converted to Roman Catholicism on the eve of World War II.That decision did not protect them from persecution.
In 1940, Irene and her husband and daughters fled to a small town where they were subjected to intensifying humiliations, hardship, and danger. But through it all, Irene planned a novel - a masterpiece - of the scope and scale of Tolstoy's War and Peace: a five-part suite that would tell the story of the fall of France and life under occupation. In rare moments of calm, she would escape into nearby woods and write her story in tiny script in a battered notebook.
Irene was arrested in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz. Her husband frantically petitioned for her release until he too was arrested and deported and gassed. The children were hidden by a devoted nanny for the remainder of the war, barely escaping death again and again. Through it all, they protected and preserved their only memento of their murdered mother: her notebooks.
But Frum says the novel is as good as the story of its birth...
For years, the daughters did not open the books. They assumed that the books were a diary of some kind, and they did not want to relive the pain of their mother's final years. But as they got old, they decided that the notebooks had to go to some kind of archive. They opened them at last, to transcribe a copy - and were stunned to discover a fully realized novel. Not just any novel, but a novel that deserves a place on the shelf of modern masterpiecces - a war novel as great as All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms. And so at last the work saw print, almost 60 years after its author's hopeless lonely death, first in French and now at length in English too.
I've enjoyed the Alan Furst novels set in late-30's Europe, when I allow myself some fiction reading. I suspect this is a different sort of novel altogether, but the era fascinates me, and it is an amazing story.
Posted by dan at October 24, 2006 12:01 AM