Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Suite Française follows the trail of several interconnected groups of people living in France in the early years of World War II. Some, like the Péricands (Madame, Philippe, Hubert, Jacqueline, Bernard, Emmanuel, and Old Monsieur) are a family, made up of people of all ages who are bound by blood. Some, like the Michauds (Jeanne and Maurice) are a couple, bound by love, as well as the painful absence of their son, Jean-Marie. Some are connected through work (Corbin, who is the boss of the Michauds at the bank), others through intimacy (Corbin's mistress, Arlette Corbail; Florence, official mistress to Gabriel Corte). Some are artists, like Gabriel, a writer. Others are kept busy protecting their own finances (Charles Langelet). Sometimes our characters come across each other; some times they travel on disparate paths.
What they have in common is their experience of a unique period in national (and global) history, from the initial exodus from Paris during the bombings, to the tenuous 'peace' of occupied France. Theirs was a kind of limbo not so dissimilar from ours, and, like us, they did not know when (or if) it would end.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Dear blobbists,
I finished reading this book quite some time ago, but I was sitting on it and marinating in it. It was a beautiful book, but certainly also heavy to digest, given the circumstances. Irène Némirovsky was a Russian Jew living in France in World War II. She was, for all intents and purposes, a Frenchwoman; they were members of the Catholic church (Jewish only by blood), they had lived in France for many years, and she was a famous writer. She began Suite Française as a series of five books; the two sections that survived were parts I and II. She lived in central France with her husband and two daughters, and while they were able to stay under the radar for a few years, eventually first Irène, and then her husband, were taken to concentration camps and murdered.
The work survived because Irène's daughter carried the suitcase containing it from one place to another, and eventually brought it to publication. We are not to know what the last three parts would have contained. We have notes, glimpses, a sense of the arc, but nothing more. This struck me for several reasons; in particular, I'm working on a literary work of my own, and, like Irène, plan for it to contain five parts. Her five (designed to be like movements in a musical piece):
1 Storm
2 Dolce
3 Captivity
4 Battles?
5 Peace?
Feel not so dissimilar from my five planned novels (also designed to mimic the movements of a piece of music; in my case, Shostakovich's 8th string quartet):
1 Terminus
2 Harbinger
3 Reclamation
4 Fealty
5 Reckoning
It is perhaps not a mistake that the third section, Captivity, was where she left off when she was taken?It felt strange to me that I read her work, 2 and the beginning of 3 complete, just when I am at the same place in my work, 2 written, 3 beginning.
In any case, maybe you are beginning to understand why I have taken my time with this one. In case it wasn't clear, I thought this was a spectacular work, and would highly recommend. My thoughts, in no real order:
I loved this line, from when a German soldier plays the piano in the home of French women with whom he is stationed:
Music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them.
There were so many moments that reminded me of the current situation with the pandemic, and many places where you could have swapped out war references for COVID seamlessly. This one stood out to me:
All in all, it's only the initial shock that counts. People get used to everything.
Other moments that reminded me of this moment
Gabriel Corte, the writer, on the war:
It threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind.
It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy. Have you struggled with this, readers? I certainly have. I've had a hard time escaping to creative, imaginative worlds. I think in my case, the best imaginative leaps come from a deeply tethered, safe grounding in reality. Perhaps the absence of this safe ground is what challenges my ability to create, to dream.
This line - Panic was intensifying, spreading like wildfire - made me think of the general and initial response.
This line, from Arlette - Please, dear God, let all this chaos end quickly! Please let us get back to a normal way of life, whatever it might be. How many times have I had this thought in the last few weeks?
And this one, which sums it up:
We don't really understand what is going on. These events will have an unimaginable impact, believe me, unimaginable. People's lives will be changed for generations.
Seasons
I think I've said before I'd like to live in a world of Pasternak's weather, and perhaps co-scripted by Murasaki's seasons. I think Némirovksy joins the list. One of my favorite things about this work was the way it described the kind of painful, transient normalcy of the seasons changing amidst the chaos. Here are a few of my favorites:
- The tender June day persisted, refusing to die.
- The sky was shining with the kind of brilliant, silvery light you sometimes find in the middle of a truly beautiful day; an almost imperceptible iridescent mist hovered in the air and all the fresh colours of June were intensified, looked richer and softer, as if reflected through a prism.
- The short June night was fading. The stars grew paler, the air smelled of milk and moist grass; now, half-hidden behind the forest, only the pink tip of the moon could be seen, growing dimmer and dimmer in the mist.
What is essential?
I loved this line, from Madame Péricand - She tried in vain to close the suitcase. No, something definitely had to go. But what? Everything was essential. I always wonder what I would consider essential in an emergency. I would probably try to take every book I own and stuff them in my car with my cat and my cello. Which wouldn't leave much room for essentials like food, camping gear, etc. Ah well. Let's just cross our fingers this doesn't come to be.
Amusingly, the Péricands' (or at least, the younger Péricands) also consider their cat, Albert, to be essential.
He slips out into the night to explore, and this was one of my favorite scenes:
At the end of a branch he began a savage, arrogant dance, taunting in his bold, warlike way, the sky, the earth, the animals, the moon. Now and again he opened his deep, narrow mouth and let out a piercing miaow, a sharp, provocative call to all the cats nearby.
French Connection
I didn't mention this above, but the other thing that made this work feel intimate to me was that it took place almost exactly when my grandmother, a sixteen-year-old girl, left Paris with her family to come to America, precisely because the Germans were occupying the country. So in a way, this felt like the literary actualization of 'what if she/they had stayed? There were also quite a few farm scenes, which made me think of our family farm, Rosehaven. Like this:
The smell of grass, milk and wild mint drifted in from the doorway.
War vs. Occupation
I'm not sure I've ever read a work about a country being occupied by another one. I've certainly read many books where a government experiences a coup, or books that take place during war times, but I think this was the first time I read a book about one country's soldiers living in, and almost settling in, to the ways and habits of another country. At one point, they mention the fact that all the clocks were set to German time (an hour's difference) and that seemed so jarring to me. I suppose maybe this was more common long ago, when the Roman empire would expand and just decide that land of one country was now part of the 'empire'. There's something weirdly gaslight-y about changing the time. I can't quite say why.
I thought this line summed up the difference well:
War...yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to one another.
Lines I Liked
- She needed a voice of authority to tell her what to believe.
- He was intoxicated by his imaginings.
- In the darkness the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence.
- Here, between the roots and the pebbles, were smells untainted by the scent of humans, smells that had yet to waft into the air and vanish. They were warm, secretive, eloquent. Alive.
- Everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity, and ignorance! What a wonderful race we are!
- [Charlie] was like a cat by nature, quickly becoming attached to places where he'd been well treated.
In running for title of this blob:
- The village was reduced to a roar.
- The world was a horrible dream.
- I'm not just anyone.
Referents and Reverberations
This book reminded me of a few other books. This moment, from one of her characters:
He wrote with a chewed-up pencil stub, in a little notebook which he hid against his heart. He felt he had to hurry: something inside him was making him anxious, was knocking on an invisible door. By writing, he opened that door, he gave life to something that wished to be born.
and this line, from her own notes about writing:
I must create something great and stop wondering if there's any point.
Both reminded me of the way Proust described his writing, and the way he worried he wouldn't be able to finish it.
I bore within me as by something fragile and precious which had been entrusted to me and which I should have liked to deliver intact into the hands of those for whom it was intended, hands which were not my own.
But for me was there still time? Was it not too late?
And when Madame Angellier hoards the key to the library and tries to keep it safe from the Germans, I was reminded of several other scenes from Fahrenheit-451, the moment in Don Quixote when they burn his library, and the scenes from the Name of the Rose centered on the protection of the library. Perhaps I am not so unique in feeling my books are essential, after all? ;)
Well. This has been a somewhat heavy blob to write, which, as I've said, is perhaps why I took so long to write it. I'll leave you with some lightness, to balance out the heft of this.
I liked this line (and to be clear, I recognize that pandemics and wars are not interchangeable, and while we have faced a variety of scary things, it is not the same as the constant threat of violence):
Living constantly in fear of death like this was only bearable if you took one day at a time, if you said to yourself each evening, "Another twenty-four hours when nothing really bad has happened, thank God! Let's see what tomorrow brings."
I also liked Arlette's comment:
We have to live to see the better times, first and foremost we have to live. Primum vivere.
And last, but not least, I loved this moment, when the Michauds return to their Paris apartment. It brought tears to my eyes, because I want the world to feel like this again.
Everything seemed secretive, friendly and sweet, as if a voice had whispered from the shadows, 'We were expecting you. Everything is as it should be.'
So, dear blobbists, keep faith, keep each other safe, keep passing the open windows, and Primum vivere. Let's see what tomorrow brings, shall we?
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