SUITE FRANCAISE. Irene Nemirovsky. Translated by Sandra Smith. 403pp. Chatto and Windus. Pounds 16.99. - 0 7011 7896 5.

To lift such a heavy weight / Sisyphus, you will need all your courage", Irene Nemirovsky wrote in her notebook in June 1941, "I do not lack the courage to complete the task / But the end is far and time is short". On August 17 the following year, she died in the concentration camp at Birkenau. Her task had been to write a 1,000-page novel that would expose the French response to Germany's invasion as "lethargic, bowed, docile, crushed like a cattle in a storm". A novelist from a wealthy Jewish background, Nemirovsky had been forced into exile in rural France (as outlined in David Coward's review of the French original in the TLS, January 14, 2005). The result of her rage and isolation was a manuscript of a long, ambitious but incomplete novel. "Captivity", the third part of a planned five, would, horribly, remain unwritten, only experienced.

"Storm in June" is the first section, describing the mass exodus from Paris in

1941, as bourgeois families took to the road along with everyone else. "Dolce" is set in an occupied village where the girls flirt with German soldiers while mothers and wives look on with hatred, reminded of their losses.

War is shown from the "local" viewpoint; single stories are developed using details of character and vivid descriptions of the countryside, right down to a "small toad whose voice seemed full of crystallized tears". Among those fleeing Paris we follow a pompous artist whose aesthetic taste is offended by the "repulsive spectacle of war", an endearing couple who see their jobs as bank clerks disappear, their wounded soldier son, an upper-class family, and the passionate Hubert, who joins the French Army despite his youth.

There is no solidarity among the hordes seeking refuge. Instead, "closed doors where you knock in vain to get a glass of water and refugees who pillaged houses; everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity and ignorance . . . . And to think that . . . there will be such a conspiracy of lies . . . that this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France". Nemirovsky wanted Suite Francaise to act as a corrective;

it was to be "a mirror up to France at its darkest hour" (as her French publisher put it). The broader political context she deliberately suppressed, believing this would help make her novel last. "Never forget", she told herself, "that the war will be over and . . . the entire historical side will fade away. Try to create as much as possible things, debates . . . that will interest people in 1952 or 2052."

The upper-class Nemirovsky is especially critical of was her own, but behind her savage depiction, there is a critical empathy that provides the most perceptive passages of the novel. "Their need to follow a routine was stronger than their terror", she explains, as the wealthy Pericand family prepare to leave Paris: