Suite Française

This story by Irène Nèmirovsky is about the beginning of the occupation of France by the Nazis. It’s about the beginning, because the author and her husband were arrested midway and murdered in Auschwitz. She’d planned it to have five parts, the last one entitled Peace. Those parts weren’t written, but in this edition her notes for the rest of the book are included, plus letters about the book, including her last scribbled note to her children, handed to a passer-by at a railway station.

This is an interesting read because it’s by someone who was there, and it’s a very well-written, often touching, often amusing story. The first section – Storm in June – covers the invasion of Paris, and different kinds of people fleeing north. It’s all from the perspective of ordinary people caught up in the petty aspects of life. There’s even a chapter from the perspective of a cat. People die foolishly, others get left behind; patriotism is vague but food and shelter for a single night – an empty chair – are the real things.

The second section, which I found more interesting, is called Dolce. It’s about a village having to accept the occupying forces living amongst them for months at a time. Again it’s from a number of points of view, always the minor people, the ordinary people who have to get on with life. But at the same time it isn’t innocuous; beside the propaganda posters of the soldiers handing out jam sandwiches to the kids is another poster warning people to stay inside at night, on pain of death. There’s the constant sense of “after the war” with no idea of what that would mean, and the growing idea of collaboration.

This isn’t a finished piece of work – I found the style slightly mannered, although perhaps that’s just the translation. There’s no conclusion, and especially in the first section little sense of the story moving strongly forward. But the characters are drawn clearly and the background detailed exquisitely. There’s the constant reminder of the men having disappeared off somewhere out of the grasp of all those wives and mothers; the constant sense of uncertainty, of having to lead a life which has no purpose or meaning any longer. And the underlying sadness of knowing the author herself never saw the end of the story.

I’ve been reading or watching lots of points of view of the same war recently – watching Changi, about the Australians in the Japanese prison camp, watching The Battle of Britain, about the Blitz and the RAF air battles. It seems a long time ago rather than just fifty years; it seems strange that there are still a lot of people living who remember that time. Not just because it’s so incredible, in the sense of incomprehensible, but also because you’d think we’d all be scarred by it, because it was just so terrible. A time when the whole world was filled with people trying to kill one another, faster and more efficiently than the other side. I suppose the world is still filled with people like that, but despite all this reading and watching, I still can’t really believe it.