"War … yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible because people get used to one another. We tell ourselves, 'They’re people just like us after all,' but they’re not at all the same." Irène Némirovski — famed writer, Russian emigre, and woman of Jewish ancestry — in the...
I had previously thought that John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces had the saddest publication history of any novel I’d ever read. Irène Némirovsky’s incomplete Suite Française, however, has an even more heartbreaking history. Némirovsky planned a five part novel about the French experience ...
Assigning a rating and reviewing any book can be a difficult task. There's the subjectivity of it: a bad meal or the rebound from a really good read can harm any decent book. There's the pressure of knowing that while my opinion probably won't sink any author, it may be one of the many stones that e...
The story of Irene Nemirovsky’s book is undoubtedly more famous than the unfinished book itself. This edition includes not only her notes (who would have thought, she felt the same way about the priest that I did?) but also correspondence from her and her family. In some ways, this inclusion of co...
What can I say? It is a miracle that this book was even published and a tragedy that it was never finished. The story behind the book is even more heartbreaking than the story, which is beautiful and moving and sad. I liked Part II better than Part I and think it was more fully realized and more ful...
I had to keep reminding myself while reading this book that it was written right at that time, i.e., during the first two years of the German occupation of France. Nemirovsky had planned three more sections in addition to "Storm in June" (during and immediately following the German invasion, as mos...
There is nothing I can say that could adequately put into words what this book means and how it affects the reader. Suite Francaise was written during the Nazi occupation of France. The author was never able to complete her novel, as she was shipped off to a concentration camp -- leaving behind he...
Suite Française debuted in English in 2006,and i was immediately drawn to the tragedy of the author's story: Irene Nemirovsky, a talented and prolific author, editor and mover/shaker of the Parisian literary world, was murdered at Auschwitz before finishing her magnum opus. I was so drawn by this tr...
This is a montage of stories, something I wasn't expecting when I first started this book. Many characters in an assortment of situations. Readers get a front row seat to what happens when the victor during a war descends upon a country to claim its spoils. Némirovsky is excellent at creating the te...
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