SUITE FRANCAISE. By Irene Nemirovsky. 434pp. Denoel. Pounds 22. 2 207 25645 6

A novel saved from the flames

Last autumn, some 650 novels were published in France for the start of the new literary season. Most will exhaust their average three months of shelf life and vanish before finding a public. Such, however, is unlikely to be the fate of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite francaise, which came out in France in September, sixty-two years after it was written. It was greeted ecstatically by the French literary press who called it "astounding", "a symphony", "a masterpiece". It was duly awarded a major literary prize, the Prix Renaudot, though not the Goncourt, which by tradition is reserved for living writers. For Nemirovsky died in 1942.

She was born in Kiev in 1903 into an upwardly mobile middle-class Ukrainian family. By 1914, her father, an energetic cap-italist, had become one of Russia's wealthiest bankers, and the family lived in great style.

Holidays were spent in the Crimea, at Biarritz and on the French Riviera, and on the eve of the First World War they moved to St Petersburg. The more her Jewish husband prospered, the more Fanny Nemirovsky, who felt she had married beneath her, distanced herself from his clan, and she turned into a vain, imperious grande dame quite deficient in maternal feeling. Irene Nemirovsky learned to hate her mother and left bitter portraits of her in her novels, notably in Le Vin de la solitude (1935). In her fiction, she also expressed considerable hostility to Jews, whom she wrote about with a "fascinated horror", as Myriam Anissimov observes in her excellent biographical introduction to Suite francaise. However, Nemirovsky distinguished carefully between integrated French Jews, whose values and destiny she shared, and those cosmopolitan men of business (like her father) in whom "love of money had replaced all other sentiments".

In 1918, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the family fled to Finland, where they remained for a year before moving to Sweden, and thence to France, in 1919. By now, Nemirovsky spoke six languages in addition to the French she had learned from her governess. She led a life of privilege in Paris, Nice and Biarritz -elegant dinner parties, balls, receptions -at a time when France's war heroes were returning to a world of unemployment and deprivation. But she was also devouring "decadents" like Huysmans and Wilde, whom she later abandoned for realists such as Balzac, Turgenev and Maupassant.

She took a degree in French Literature at the Sorbonne and in 1923 began selling short stories to magazines and periodicals. In 1926 she married Michel Epstein, a Russian emigre businessman, and began a family. Denise, born in

1927, was followed ten years later by Elisabeth.