Suite française (Némirovsky novel)

Tempête en juin

The narrative follows several groups of characters who encounter one another rarely if at all. All are impelled to flee from Paris in advance of the German entry into the city. As transport and distribution collapse under German bombardment, all have to change their plans and nearly all lose the veneer of civilization.

The Péricands are making for Nîmes, where they have property. They reach the city but in the course of the journey, Charlotte Péricand's senile father-in-law is left behind (forgotten) while her second son, Hubert, runs away to join the army and shares in its collapse. Her elder son, Philippe, is a priest and is shepherding a party of orphans, who eventually kill him (in a death scene perhaps in need of revision, Némirovsky comments in her notebook, because it is melo [melodramatic]). Gabriel Corte, a well-known writer, flees with his mistress and makes for Vichy, where he may or may not find refuge and employment. Charles Langelet, an aesthete, flees alone in his car, filching petrol from trusting acquaintances in order to get as far as the Loire; he returns to Paris and is killed, accidentally and memorably.

Maurice and Jeanne Michaud, minor employees at a bank, are instructed to go to Tours though deprived at the last minute of the transport promised by their employer. Their son, Jean-Marie is with the army and they have no word of his fate. They cannot get to Tours and eventually return to Paris, unemployed and almost destitute but destined to survive. Jean-Marie is in fact wounded; he is being tended by the Sabarie family at their small farm near Bussy, where he is nursed back to health by Madeleine, the Sabaries' foster daughter. At the end of the novel as postal services are restored, Jean-Marie is able to contact his family and return to Paris. The Michauds, alone among major characters, grow in moral stature as chaos spreads.

Dolce

The small town of Bussy and its neighbouring farms are the scene throughout. The German occupation seems sweetly peaceful but there is no doubt over the balance of power. The Germans get whatever they ask for, official notices promise the death penalty for those who disobey their regulations and French collaborators, including the Péricands, make their own settlement with their German overlords.

The main plot concerns Lucile Angellier, whose unfaithful husband is a prisoner of war. She lives uneasily, with her mother-in-law. Theirs being the best house in the village, it is where the German commander, Bruno von Falk, an accomplished musician, is billeted. Unwillingly Lucile finds herself falling in love with him. In this and several parallel strands, the novel explores the deep, perhaps unbridgeable, differences and the perhaps superficial sympathies, between military Germans and rural French.

The minor plot concerns the family of Benoît Sabarie, a prisoner of war who escapes from German captivity, returns home to the family farm near Bussy, marries his fiancée Madeleine and believes (with some justification) that she still pines for Jean-Marie Michaud, whom she nursed during his recovery. Jealous by nature, Benoît also believes that Madeleine risks being seduced by the German interpreter, Bonnet, who is billeted in their house. Caught poaching, arrested for possessing a gun, Benoît struggles free and shoots Bonnet dead. (In her notebook, Némirovsky mentions a possible revision where Bonnet is wounded, not killed.)

The stories come together when, at Madeleine's request, Lucile conceals Benoît in her house. It is widely assumed that Bruno's presence in the house and his liking for Lucile, will protect her against searches. The need to conceal Benoît brings Lucile and her mother-in-law closer; it drives her apart from Bruno, though he never knows why.

After an astonishing and powerful scene in which German troops celebrate the first anniversary of their entry into Paris, Dolce ends in July 1941, when Germany begins its invasion of the Soviet Union. The troops occupying Bussy are posted to the Eastern Front. Lucile and Bruno fear that he will not survive and she has no difficulty in persuading him to give her a travel document and petrol coupon, which (unknown to him) will enable her to drive Benoît to a new refuge. The title of Dolce, like that of the whole sequence, intentionally recalls musical terminology, dolce means "sweet" or "soft" in musicians' Italian. This title is truthful but also ironic, since bitterness exist under the surface and a far less peaceful sequel was to follow.

Captivité

The plot of Némirovsky's third novel exists as a plot outline, with some contradictions, in her notebook. Benoît has "friends" (the nascent Communist resistance) in Paris. Lucile drives him to the city, where he is concealed by the Michauds, whom the Angelliers met briefly in Tempête en juin. In Paris, Benoît and Jean-Marie Michaud are denounced, arrested and in prison, meet Hubert. Jean-Marie is pardoned by the Germans, when Lucile contacts Bruno von Falk on his behalf. Benoît and his friends organize an escape and release Jean-Marie and Hubert. Jean-Marie and Lucile meet and fall in love but after learning that she is still in love with Bruno, he leaves to fight against the Germans and dies heroically. On the Eastern Front, Bruno is also killed, Lucile losing her French and German beloveds. In a sub-plot, the writer Gabriel Corte, a relatively minor and unsympathetic character in Tempête en juin, emerges as a propagandist and politician, initially collaborating with the Germans, later perhaps disaffected; Benoît dies brutally and full of hope.

French publication

Suite française was published by Denoël, Paris, in 2004. ISBN 2-207-25645-6; pocket edition (Folio) ISBN 2-07-033676-X. The edition includes a preface by Myriam Anissimov, notes by Némirovsky about the revision and planned continuation of the sequence, and correspondence between Némirovsky herself, her husband Michel Epstein, her publisher Albin Michel and others in the period before and after her deportation.

Suite française won the Prix Renaudot for 2004. This is the first time that the prize has been awarded posthumously.

Translations

An English translation by Sandra Smith was published by Chatto & Windus, London, 2004, and by Knopf, New York, in 2006. ISBN 1-4000-4473-1. An Indonesian translation by Mimi Benetto and Lenah Susianty was published by Qanita, Jakarta, in 2011. ISBN 978-602-8579-80-3.

Similarities with other novels

Some readers have noticed similarities between Bruce Marshall's 1943 novel Yellow Tapers for Paris and Irène Némirovsky's Suite française which was written at about the same time but not discovered until 1998.^[5] There is no suggestion of plagiarism, Némirovsky was dead before Marshall's novel was published and no one saw Némirovsky's work before its 1998 discovery. Both works have protagonists who work in finance, Marshall's protagonist is an accountant while Némirovsky's work has several characters who work for a bank. Both books were written during and/or immediately after the event but show significant reflection; they are not autobiographical works but fiction featuring invented characters. The stories cover the prelude of the Nazi invasion and its aftermath but the events in the stories are much different. Marshall's ends before the occupation, while Némirovsky's has significant portions devoted to it. "Dolce," the second part of Suite française, is similar to Le Silence de la Mer, a novella by the French author Vercors (pseudonym of Jean Bruller). Both stories deal with a German officer, who in civilian life was a composer, who is quartered in the house of a young French woman. Suite française and Le Silence de la Mer were finished in early 1942.

Controversy

Several reviewers and commentators^[6][7] have raised questions regarding Némirovsky's attitude toward Jews, her generally negative depiction of Jews in her writing and her use of anti-semitic publications in advancing her career. A review of her work published in The New Republic states:

Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky's stories of corrupt Jews—some of them even have hooked noses, no less!—appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles. When the racial laws in 1940 and 1941 cut off her ability to publish, she turned to those connections to seek special favors for herself, and even went so far as to write a personal plea to Marshal Pétain.^[8]