Chatto £16.99 pp405
The facts surrounding the discovery of this book are as remarkable as its contents are magnificent. In July 1942, Irène Némirovsky, a Russian-born novelist who had lived in France since 1919, was arrested under the race laws and deported to Auschwitz where she died within weeks. In November, her husband, also Jewish, met the same fate. Their daughters, Denise (13) and Elisabeth (5), who survived by going into hiding, took with them as a memento of their mother her leatherbound notebook. Reading it proved too painful until, in 1996, Denise decided to transcribe its contents before handing it to a war archive. Instead of being a diary as she had assumed, the notebook (whose minuscule script she needed a magnifying glass to decipher) turned out to contain a projected four- or five-part fictional sequence, Suite Française, chronicling the fall of France in 1940 and its aftermath. The later sections never got beyond intensely fascinating notes about Némirovsky’s literary intents. The first two, Storm in June and Dolce, each in effect a free-standing novella, are masterpieces of French fiction.
Storm in June begins with an eerily beautiful panorama of Paris during a distant, dawn air raid. All lights are blacked out. But, under the golden early summer sky, every house and street and monument (the Opéra and the Arc de Triomphe wadded in sandbags) is visible and vulnerable. The Seine seems a glistening signal guiding enemy planes to the heart of the capital.
Within days, as the Germans advance, another kind of river flows out of Paris. Dragging suitcases, pushing carts, wheelbarrows and prams, in cars that look like mobile mounds of belongings, refugees flee the menaced city. Among them are the Péricands, an affluent French establishment family, Catholic, cultivated and soon to be collaborationist; a ferociously self-centred writer; the dancer-mistress of a boorish businessman; an epicene aesthete fussily solicitous of his rare porcelain vases and cups; and a decent working-class couple.
The intersecting fortunes of these and hordes of others, under bombing on the dusty poplar-lined roads or scavaging for food in towns overwhelmed by the tidal wave of desperation pouring into them, are grippingly recorded. Hunger, panic and exhaustion push things towards anarchy. Then, with the armistice, the tide turns. People drift back to Paris and the new regime, to which the privileged now ignobly adapt.
The main characters of Storm in June are metropolitan. Those in Dolce, a superb Balzac-like study of a village deep in the French countryside, are provincials. The story opens as the soldiers march in on Easter Sunday morning and closes, months later, when they leave for the Russian front. In between is a finely observed picture of how occupiers and occupied relate to each other. Initially just “the Germans”, the soldiers gradually emerge into individuality for the villagers. Filaments of attachment spread from both sides. At the story’s core is Lucile, unhappily married to an unfaithful oaf now in a POW camp. When a civilised young German officer, Bruno, is billeted in the house she shares with her sour mother-in-law, what ensues is traced with hair-trigger alertness and emotional sophistication.
Storm in June is fast and furious, Dolce brooding and melancholy. In both it’s the nuances of personal lives and fates, not war’s large-scale convulsions, that engage Némirovsky. Complexity is her forte. “It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising,” Lucile tells herself, “but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it.” Characters repeatedly exhibit this. Lucile’s mother-in-law is a joyless, narrow- minded bigot; she is also an old woman who defies the invaders with contemptuous bravery. In emergency, the cosseted smug matron, Madame Péricand, shows herself formidably resourceful. Mixed responses keep being spotlit. On the face of an honest, thrifty old man, frantic for shelter during the exodus from Paris, “you could see his shame at having to offer a bribe for the first time in his life, and his fear at having to spend all his money”.
Némirovsky’s life — pitched by the Russian revolution from a plutocratic childhood in St Petersburg into impoverished exile, dislodged from a glittering literary career in Paris by the Nazis — must have made her acutely aware of contrasts. Certainly, juxtaposition plays a powerful role in her fiction. War throws together characters from very different backgrounds. Cruelly idyllic weather and the scents of summer blossom counterpoint terror and slaughter. Nature offers parallels, too. Under aerial attack, a man reflects that this must be how small birds feel as hawks circle above them. Herd instincts, it’s stressed, impel human beings just as much as other animals. A virtuoso chapter set inside the senses of a cat hunting a bird by night is followed by one depicting the dancer Arlette’s feline seduction of a fledgling soldier.
Suite Française brims with documentary interest (it’s extraordinary to read a work written so much in the thick of the events it is watching that its author, as her notes acknowledge, can’t yet know how things will end). But its lasting achievement is its poised artistry. France’s defeat isn’t just put in perspective by talk of Waterloo, 1870 and 1914, but by scenes such as one where a young woman serves cakes on First Empire plates decorated with vignettes of Napoleon at his military zenith.
The influence of Némirovsky’s favourite Russian authors, Turgenev and Tolstoy, is impressively imprinted on her pages. So is Flaubert’s credo of impersonality and indirection. One skilfully angled scene sees Lucile and Bruno through the uncomprehending eyes of a little girl who is just as interested in a ladybird that has landed on her arm. Irony that Flaubert would have relished glints obliquely: playing the harp at concerts for the disadvantaged, Madame Péricand is “gratified to notice that, at certain passages, sobbing could be heard in the darkened hall”. Most Flaubertian of all is the unwavering lucidity the book trains on its subjects. Balancing this rigour of perception with generosity of spirit is what gives Suite Française its distinctive, appealing quality. Sharp dissection of meanness, greed, vanity or egotism coexists with warm receptivity to courage, selflessness, pathos, dignity and tolerance. Sympathy is especially valued. In a work designed to imitate a symphony, music is praised because it “can abolish differences of language or culture”.
As riveting biographical material and extracts from letters included here affectingly attest, Suite Française was persisted with under increasingly hostile conditions. Its author had to wear the Star of David, was banned from travel, shunned by former literary colleagues and, denied any source of income, was painfully short of money (her handwriting in her notebook was minute to save on paper). That, despite all this, it is devoid of bitterness and full of creative élan seems little short of miraculous. Against the odds, Suite Française has survived. It does so as a triumph of indomitability and a masterwork of literary accomplishment.
Available at the Books First price of £15.29 on 0870 165 8585
