Last edited Tue Jul 7, 2015, 06:50 PM - Edit history (3)
I’ve read several reviews, and it’s clear that this is a great work of art from the Russian perspective of Irene Nemirovsky, a Jewish woman originally from the Ukraine, then living in Nazi-occupied France until her death from typhus in a concentration camp. During the few years that she lived in the French countryside during that stressful time, she wrote the first two novels of the Suite as a kind of contemporaneous account of various humans as they moved through France during different stages of the occupation. Her intent was to write of five stages, but she only lived long enough to complete two, plan the third, and make sketchy notes for the others. But what she did complete was achieved brilliantly and incisively.
From what I understand, even her use of French has a distinctly Russian flavor since her major influence was Tolstoy’s War and Peace, along with vestiges of Turgenev and Chekhov. It’s also clear, then, that this book should be read and taught in universities and schools, both as a work of art and as an illumination on a society under stress with all the human complexity that involves.
Not to diminish The Diary of Anne Frank, but Nemirovsky’s work moves out much more greatly into the French society of Nazi occupation with all its irony and perspectives on French people and German soldiers that cut right through all the propaganda and stereotypes to paint a much more complex human picture. The Suite is not a diary per se, though it was written as a contemporaneous account of a time and place that every human soul should become acquainted with in order to understand what humans are really like in these situations: some good, some not so good; some altruistic, most selfish and insensitive; the soldiers not really brutish, apish Huns but rather human beings caught up in circumstances where they often try to do the right thing and make human connections, only then to be carted off to the horrors of Hitler’s vain attempt to occupy Stalinist Russia with the shadow of War and Peace looming here in a big way, only from the point of view of a Jewish woman, now French in the most ironic fashion, since all the upper class Russians of Tolstoy’s world spoke French and sympathized with the newly revolutionary French view of the world while actually living as aristocrats. The implications of this layer of history are always present between the lines, so to speak, and that is what great literature does sometimes when it acknowledges recurring themes and includes the history that informs it.
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