Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky number of voters: 3
percentage of voters who finished the book: 100
highest rating: 9
lowest rating: 7
average rating: 8.167
percentage of book clubbers who didn’t read the book (shame on us!): 75
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[personal disclaimer: Since I have still failed to finish reading this book, my recap centers more on what fascinates me about it and why I still desire to finish it than on our discussion recap...]
It’s June, 1940. You are a French authoress of Jewish descent, and your country is being invaded by the Germans. What do you do?
You write, of course.
You write what you see, what you hear, what you feel. Only you make it a novel, because the wound is still too raw to expose it to the air. You write a true story about fictional characters in the midst of invasion, flight, and quick defeat. You write about the foreign occupation and the tenuous peace it brings. For two years, you write. The story is unfolding around you every day.
But you do not know how the story will end. This part of the story, you cannot foretell.
It’s July, 1942. Your Jewish heritage is discovered by the Germans. You are sent to Auschwitz. And you are sent to the gas chambers.
This is the true story of Irène Némirovsky. It is not the story told in Suite Française, but knowing the author’s story makes the book all the more poignant.
And what of that unfinished novel? Madame Némirovsky’s daughters keep their mother’s notebook and, assuming it is a memoir with too traumatic of details, do not open its pages for 50 years, at which time they discover two parts of an unfinished suite.
Suite Française is part historical fiction and part history. It is haunting for the story it is, but even more so for the story the author herself could not tell.
