SPL Reads!

The Avid Readers book club convened on yet another evening that carried with it the threat of horrible weather.  The last two meetings have taken place under the shadow of forecasted snowfall, and this latest meeting was nearly derailed by a predicted deluge of rain and possible hail.  Thankfully, the weather rain dried up and the clouds even parted for a few hours to allow for our discussion of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, a novel about the German occupation of France written during the German occupation of France by a Jewish writer living in France.  The novel is actually a combination of two novellas of a proposed five that were written immediately preceding the author’s imprisonment and death at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. 

The story behind the novel’s publication is just as interesting as the plot of the novel.  Nemirovsky wrote the first two novellas were handwritten in tiny script in a leatherbound journal.  When Nemirovsky’s husband was later taken to Auschwitz, the couple’s daughters fled, taking with them a suitcase of family documents, including that leatherbound notebook.  For years, neither daughter examined the contents of the notebook, fearing that it contained a journal or diary, the contents of which would prove to painful to read.  Then, in 2004, the daughters donated their mother’s papers to a museum, and the contents of the notebook were finally discovered, translated, and published.

Suite Francaise is, of course, an unfinished novel, and as such, there is no satisfying conclusion.  Although the author did leave behind copious notes about the events of the next part of the novel (and even some notes about the final two parts), so much of what was not written was due to the fact that history had yet to unfold the background against which Nemirovsky’s characters interact.  In fact, in the author’s notes (published here as an appendix to the novel), she admits that the final parts of the novel are in “limbo,” as the world events surrounding their plots was still very much in flux.

What we found most enjoyable about Suite Francaise is what sets it apart from most World War II novels: that it focuses on the day to day lives of common people.  Nemirovsky wrote that she wanted to portray the comedy of day to day life, and there are moments of quiet comedy in the novel that seem almost incongruous with the calamitous events taking place on the world stage.  The events of Suite Francaise, especially the second part, concern mostly common people who are trying to retain some sense of normalcy in the midst of war.  

 The first novella, Storm in June, uses multiple viewpoints to depict the mass exodus of people from Paris at the threat of the German advance.  We see the chaos through the eyes of a middle-aged couple, an aristocratic family (and in one instance, their cat), a famous writer, and a priest travelling with a group of juvenile delinquents.  In the second novella, Dolce, Nemirovsky uses a tighter focus, mostly depicting an occupied provincial town through the eyes of a young woman who has trouble reconciling her personal feelings for a German officer with her national identity. 

We were evenly split over our opinions for Suite Francaise: some of us liked it wholeheartedly, others didn’t care for it, and still others preferred the first novella to the second.  Nevertheless, the novel is an interesting historical artifact and one of the few pieces of historical fiction about the German occupation that is actually contemporary to the period.

We’ll be shifting gears next month to read a bit of modern fantasy.  We’ll meet again May 1 to discuss Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child.  This novel is the story of a young man who is captured by a group of mysterious forest creatures and raised by them.  In his place, the creatures leave a changeling, who is in turn raised by “normal” parents.  The novel chronicles the lives of both young men, and highlights their searches for identity.