A few months ago, my friends took me to The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. In many ways, it's meant more for the Instagram pictures than for actually finding books, but I did get two new audiobooks. You could say I'm a voracious reader, but of audiobooks; with my 40-minute commute, I get through a lot of them, usually provided by the public library. If you ever buy an audiobook, they're usually around $30, so being able to get something for like $2 was super nice. That's how I came to be in possession of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française, a book written in 1940-42 but not published until 2004.
First, background on Nemirovsky, she was a Ukrainian Jew that escaped the Russian Revolution with her family when she was teenager. The family settled in Paris, France. She went to the Sorbonne and became famous as an author in her lifetime. Despite conversion to Catholicism, she was arrested as a Jew and killed in the Holocaust in 1942. Nemirovsky's daughter unknowingly kept the manuscript for Suite Française and accompanying notes in a suitcase for 50 years. The daughter believed the suitcase contained only journals that would be too painful to read. When she decided to donate the contents to a museum, that's when she read through that particular notebook and realized it was a collection of novellas, at least two finished ones and three more ideas described.
I loved listening to this book. In general, I'm fascinated by World War II history, so it was really special to listen to something that actually came from the time. Like we have Saving Private Ryan and other movies, or books written today like The Book Thief that take place in that time, but they are written looking back. This book was written during, and it's fiction! I suppose you could call it contemporary fiction of the time.
The first part of Suite Française is all about different characters escaping Paris in June 1940 as the Nazis are close to entering the city. We get a nice swath of life with people like a Catholic priest in charge of a school of troubled youth, a rich banker dealing with his wife and mistress, an author who thought himself above everyone else, and more. There's descriptions of roads being closed to allow soldiers to get past the flooding refugees, villages being closed as they get overrun by multitudes of unwanted guests, people escaping with their animals, people stealing cars or desperately searching for petrol (gasoline). There's even what I call The Last of Us-style setting details with the human world on metaphorical fire but nature still being as beautiful and outside-the-crisis as ever.
The second part takes place in one village, Bussy, and how the people deal with Nazi occupation. Nemirovsky makes all of the characters so human; it's not all good and evil. She describes how the people get used to "their Germans," knowing who does what and who likes to drink, whose wife is having a baby back home, who is funny. There's fear and there's even romance. There's curiosity and there's outright rejection, symbolized by an old woman that shuts herself in her room for months. Even among the French people, Nemirovsky writes of stealing from those perceived rich, the belief that "we will never turn on our own kind" versus people doing just that for their own safety, and even a former French soldier killing a German officer in cold blood. There is gray all around, until the end of the novella where the Nazis leave for the new Russian front.
When I was in France teaching in 2020 to 2021, I visited American friends living in a very, very small village near Angoulême in sort of north-central France. My friend told me how people don't forget who was a Vichy supporter and who not, even 80 years later. Suite Française made me think of that. Especially for the romance between the officer and one of the main characters, I thought about how people say, "Love is love," and what would they do if it did last? Spoiler, it doesn't last, but she wishes him well and to take care of himself in Russia. Or like it appears many of the richer people were kind of expected to support the Vichy government and the Nazis, more as a way to preserve nobility and disallow equalization in a "bolshevik" way. So what if they did hate the Nazis, but couldn't show it, as we see with the mayor's family in the second story? In general, there was just a lot of "you don't know what people have going in their lives, so don't judge" kind of theme.
Overall, definitely worth the read; it's relatively short too. Apparently there's a movie, but they play up a romance in the first book that's really just mentioned in passing in the book. Reading a first-hand account (and in a way I think it being fiction makes it even more relatable) is always awesome, and I'm so glad that we have this. It's always so cool to think that more and more things can still be discovered of a time or person that we think we know almost everything about. For example, a missing piece to one of the Mozart horn concertos was only found in the 1990s. The humanity and gray-ness of these two short stories makes that time come alive and less comic book good versus evil. Check out Suite Française, read it, and let me know what you think!
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