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  • book 1 is an excellent, lyrical story of the exodus from Paris ahead of the Nazi army's invasion, following a number of different people and family groups as they leave; book 2 is an account of village life which conveys the mixed attitudes--hatred, camaraderie, love, lust, admiration, etc.-- of Fre ... Continue

    book 1 is an excellent, lyrical story of the exodus from Paris ahead of the Nazi army's invasion, following a number of different people and family groups as they leave; book 2 is an account of village life which conveys the mixed attitudes--hatred, camaraderie, love, lust, admiration, etc.-- of French townspeople and farmers toward their German occupiers, and vice versa, with some overlap of characters from book 1. Made all the more poignant because of the author's subsequent arrest and murder in Auschwitz.

    Be sure to read the "Preface to the French Edition," which in my copy is at the end of the book. Then read the Appendix II--Nemirovsky's husband's heart-wrenching and increasingly-frantic correspondence chronicling his frustrated efforts to find and help his wife after her arrest and deportation.

    

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• ― Lynn (lparmoc) said on Jan 16, 2009 | 1 feedback| 1 feedback

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  • Just finished the first part of the book. Not as good as I thought it should be.

    

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• ― Cherie Hsu said on Nov 23, 2009 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • The writing may drive you a bit crazy, but the story of how this book came to be is compelling, which makes it a worthwhile read.

    

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• ― Bjj11 said on Oct 22, 2008 | Add your feedback

An extraordinary novel of life under Nazi occupation--discovered and published 62 years after the author's tragic death at Auschwitz. Subtle, often fiercely ironic, and deeply compassionate, "Suite Franaise" is both a piercing record of its time and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.


By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky began working on what would become Suite Francaise-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 Nemirovsky’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 demand... [예스24 제공]

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• Historical FictionFictionfrancenaziparisvichyvillageworld war IImulti-partevacuation
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