"My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life."

-- Irène Némirovsky, Handwritten wartime notes

When finally opened, Irène Némirovsky's wartime notebooks, which had been kept under wraps by her daughter for sixty years, let out a novel that captivated France and won the 2004 Prix Renaudot. Practically forgotten after World War II, Némirovsky had begun publishing in France in 1929, more than a decade after escaping Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution as the teenage daughter of a successful Jewish banker. Yet one encounter with history was not enough: in 1940, Némirovsky, by then the mother of two young girls, had to escape again, a foreign Jew in occupied France .

In the months when Némirovsky and her family hid in a rural French village, she would retreat every morning into the woods, fold her coat to sit on, and write. Némirovsky jotted notes on the contemporary state of France , conceiving an epic novel stretching from the German invasion in June 1940 all the way to the yet-unforeseeable end of the war. Indeed, though she wrote furiously, the novel remained unfinished. Némirovsky was deported in the summer of 1942 and killed at Auschwitz that August. Soon her husband would meet the same end. Her daughters, saved by a governess, emerged alive, their mother's notebooks stuffed in a suitcase.

Suite Française, the first two of Némirovsky's five projected sections, is flawed when considered only as a work of art. Most of its characters are not fully drawn individuals but flat types; many narrative twists are close to formulaic. Yet to judge this novel by the usual standard for a completed work would be to misunderstand Suite Française and the history of its production. Indeed, the novel reads not just as literature but also as historical source and as the personal testimony of Némirovsky's last months. It is published with her intensely vivid personal notes from the period.

The first half of Suite Française portrays the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940. Disinterested in politics and military strategy, Némirovsky instead observes the misadventures of representative Frenchmen (and women) from all walks of life. Her attempt to depict an entire society results in two rather clichéd alignments of characters: on the one hand, a selfish upper class of pretentious writers, vulgar social climbers and bigoted industrialists, and on the other, members of the peuple menu , the little people, for the most part decent and admirable. That the French governing class largely did sell out to the German occupiers does not entirely redeem the predictable tropes in these pages. Nonetheless, Némirovsky's terse style often rescues the novel in the depiction of a moment, an event. The bombing of the Tours train station or the sudden murder of a priest by a group of orphans communicate poignancy with economy and grace.

The second part of the novel, "Dolce," grows well beyond the limits set by the first. Set in one household of an occupied village, it tells of a long and repressed love affair between a lonely Frenchwoman and a German official. Delicately, the ambiguities of occupation and resistance unfold. Unlike in fiction of the Resistance such as Vercors' Le Silence de la Mer or Steinbeck's The Moon is Down , whose propagandistic intention precludes much nuance, here the (im)possibility of genuine human contact in wartime is minutely rendered. Lucile's experience of the German who is living in her house begins with an "exquisitely intense sensation, a mixture of tenderness and terror" and blossoms into a "strange happiness." Yet when after months of reciprocal affection the couple finally moves towards physical intimacy, Lucile realizes that their love is impossible:

He was whispering to her in German. Foreigner! Foreigner! Enemy, in spite of everything. Forever he would be the enemy, with his green uniform, with his heavenly beautiful hair and his confident mouth.

Despite noting in passing that "defeat arouses the worst in men," Némirovsky tries to promote the vision of a humanity that goes beyond nation or historical event. Her wry humor is well-suited to this end; while it satirizes what it describes, it is never cruel. Even the most virulent hypocrisy is exposed without bitterness. The emphasis on all the human interactions possible even under extreme circumstance is inevitably all the more striking for a readership conscious of the author's murder. Yet this is not a novel about the Holocaust or Nazi ideology. Nazism and anti-Semitism make only minor appearances. Némirovsky's Germans are thoroughly likeable men following orders. Their departure from the French village at the end of the novel is described with tender melancholy.

Némirovsky removed herself from judging according to contemporary standards (by which the Germans would have figured as enemies) in an attempt to write for posterity and indeed, many of her canny statements have been confirmed by time. A striking irony results when, towards the end of "Dolce," someone remarks: "We'll forget after 1940 that we were defeated, which will perhaps be our salvation." Forgetting has in fact been the main strategy for coping with 1940 and the years of collaboration and moral compromise that followed, making the enthusiastic reception of this novel only imaginable in the present day, in which attempted remembrance has replaced willful oubli . The French difficulty at confronting "the trauma of 1940" is notorious: Némirovsky's accusations against Vichy collaborators would in the early postwar period have fallen on deaf ears.

It would be simplistic, nonetheless, to read Suite Française as a retrospectively welcome condemnation of the French upper classes. While she does often make such an explicit critique, Némirovsky also subtly contrasts a lower-class affair with a German soldier--consummated, then rationalized--with the more virtuous and truer experience of the thoroughly middle-class heroine. The cultivated protagonists realize the full implications of their situation and cannot explain them away for the sake of physical comfort. This elitist comparison necessarily undercuts the rest of the novel's populism.

In spite of this ambiguity, Némirovsky's stated goal was to overcome differences. Perhaps this aim also explains her modeling the novel on a Beethoven symphony. Némirovsky believed that music could "abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them," and more than the structural, symphonic conceit implied in the title, this universality seems her primary concern.

With the phantom author in mind--the mother seeking a quiet spot in the woods, sensing death's imminence-- Suite Française seems less of an incomplete epic and more of a personal strategy for coping with catastrophe, a sublimated diary. Such an interpretation of the novel is supported by a brief passage early on that renders a young writer's self-doubt, as well as the redemptive effect of writing. Although her prose, through the near miracle of its preservation and recovery, has value well beyond the merely therapeutic, these lines suggest her reliance on writing in unspeakably difficult times:

What was he doing writing these stupid stories... when the future was so uncertain, the past so bleak? But while he was thinking these thoughts, he saw one of the foals run joyously towards him... He tried to describe that look... He quickly wrote down a few awkward, unfinished lines. They were no good, he hadn't captured the essence, but it would come; he closed the notebook and finally sat still, hands open in his lap, eyes closed, tired and happy.

 

Alexander Bevilacqua '07 studies French and European history.