It's Monday! What Are You Reading? - Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

This is a meme hosted by Book Journey.

What I'm Reading Now:
At our last meeting I brought my copy of 1914 by Jean Echenoz. (Talked about it here.) Claudia seemed interested and then recommended this week's book. It just so happened that this book is also my book club pick for April.


  Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece  

The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity. 

Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

If you haven't already read this book or if it has been sitting on your to be read list I highly suggest picking it up! I'm only about a quarter of the way into the book and I'm loving it. During the craziness of the exodus of Paris during WWII a number of people from all different walks of life are set on similar paths rushing from town to town trying to out run the Germans. I don't know how it all plays out but this is where I'm at right now in the story.

-Amelia