num_pages: 395
description: By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
language: English
title: Suite Francaise
titlecomplete: Suite Francaise
characters: Jean-Marie Michaud, Philippe Péricand, Madeleine Sabarie, Hubert Péricand, Charles Langelet, Charlotte Péricand, Maurice Michaud, Jeanne Michaud, Gabriel Corte
genres: Book Club, Historical Fiction, Historical, Novels, Classics, War, Fiction, Holocaust, World War II, France
ratings_count: 73102
awards: awardedAt: 1325404800000
name: Magnesia Litera
category: Translation (Litera za překladovou knihu), awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Prix Renaudot, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: PEN Translation Prize
category: Sandra Smith, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: French-American Foundation Translation Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize
publisher: Alfred A. Knopf