Suite Francaise

* This week I've felt a bit melancholy, partly because a lot of people are leaving my workplace because we're being "restructured" and partly because I finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. (I know there are plenty of French curly whatsits and accents in both of those those things but it would have taken me too long to do to them right so I gave up.

When it was published here, the story of how the book came to be written received a lot of press attention. Russian-Jewish novelist living in France for 20 years dies in Auschwitz. Sixty years later her daughter realises the notebook she's carted round as a keepsake of her mother contains an unfinished novel that was written in incredibly tiny handwriting to save paper while she lived in exile in a tiny village during the Nazi occupation of France. Sadly, her other daughter dies a few years before the notebook is transcribed. Oh the humanity! Why didn't anyone read it sooner? Just the sheer waste of talent and life seemed horrifying.

Which also made me dubious about whether the book would be any good. It wasn't until my mum lent me her copy that I bothered to read it. And it is good. Unfinished - possibly 40 per cent finished - it tells the story of how several different groups of people respond to the German invasion. Part one is about an incredbily chaotic evacuation of Paris in 1940. Part two covers dealing with the enemy occupying a village and a farm. It ends with the Germans leaving to go to the Russian front. What would happen next is only roughly sketched out because she was writing in approximately real time.

The niceties of civilised behaviour are strained by the circumstances of exodus while pursued by bombers. Nemirovsky has a very deft way of skewering the vanities and pomposities of her characters and meting out appropriate treatment. The rich woman who prides herself on her Christian charity merrily shares her stores of biscuits with other refugees until she realises the shops are empty. TThen only HER children matter. The man who values his porcelain more than people meets an appopriate end. The banker who reneges on an offer of a lift to his staff because his mistress insists on taking their place is punished for his selfishness. Others rise to the crisis and help children find their parents.

The second part is less urgent and more bucolic. The Germans are living amongst us. Who will talk to them? Who will sleep with them? There are some wonderful descriptions of the natural world as well as of the intense claustrophobia of village life. Behind the closed shutters eyes are watching! There is tremendous humanity in this section as Nemirovsky makes the German soldiers individuals who are kind to animals and really truly can fall in love. There are also no real surprises about which characters become collaborators.

The appendices include her plans for the rest of the book (a complex construction based on musical structure without much musical knowledge which sounds pretty dodgy to me - but then it's only a plan) and correspondence about her life. The contrast between her circumstances and her book could hardly be more stark. As a foreign Jew (despite her baptism as an adult), she was banned from publication and from receiving roylaites for earlier works. She couldn't travel. Eventually she was arrested and for months and months her husband tried to find her until he too was taken to a concentration camp. Her children were only spared with the help of friends who kept them hidden until the end of the war.

Nowhere at all does the book mention the persecution of the Jews. I don't know whether this was because she thought such things shouldn't be talked about. Or if she thought her book would be more popular this way (there is a comment in her plan to include many descriptions of the lives of the rich because people loved this) or if she really didn't see this as part of the French experience of the War. In this era of identity politics this omission seems very peculiar and doubly sad.

Without knowing the circumstances of Nemirovsky's life, you'd think this was a clever, insightful and wise book. Knowing them, it seems tragic that she was able to recognise the humanity of the Germans even though they didn't pay her the same courtesy.

*This was originally posted LAST week but I couldn't remove dodgy comments offering me untold riches without pulling it down/