Resumo de Suite Française - Irene Nemirovsky, Sandra Smith (Translator)

At the end of the volume, aseries of appendices and a biographical sketch provide, among other things,information about the author of the novellas. From a purely aestheticstandpoint, the back story of "Suite Française" is irrelevant to thetrue business of criticism. The bombardment resumes: "A shell was fired,now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument birds rose into thesky. She spent her adult life in France, wrote in French but preserved thedetachment and cool distance of the outsider. The first, "Storm inJune," gives us a cross section of the population during the initialexodus from the capital, when a battle for Paris was expected and people fledhelter-skelter south, so that the roads were clogged with refugees of allclasses. Némirovsky shows how much caste and money continued to matter, how thenation was not united in the face of danger and a common enemy. In her account,the well-to-do continue to be especially egotistical and petty. Looking up tothe sky at enemy planes overhead, the refugees who have to sleep on the streetor in their cars "lacked both courage and hope. It was the way fish caughtin a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth abovethem." I can't think of a more chilling and concise image to convey thehelplessness of civilians in an air raid.The second part,"Dolce" (the title -- Italian for "sweet" -- derives fromNémirovsky's plan to give the work a musical structure), covers the occupationby the Germans of a small village, from the so-called armistice in June 1940 tothe Soviet Union's entry into the war a year later. But the unnatural situationalso breeds fierce feelings of resentment and humiliation. Perhaps she wantedto save the fate of the Jews for the next part, which was to be entitled"Captivity." Without acentral narrator, through the depiction of lives that in some cases areinterlocking, in others tangential, indeed in most merely coeval, the feel of aworld in dissolution has never been so effectively conveyed, both the generalmaelstrom and the personal experience. This novel speaks to the heart directly and, through the heart, to the intellect.The writing is thorough and gripping, detail is probed and embelished only whennecessary. I think this is so only to the extent that the emerging picture isso flavorful and complete. The first novella has to do with the flight from Paris and the French defeat;the second, with life in a village under the occupation. Recommendation: skip the introduction and don't browse the appendices first. But,it must be emphasized: the greatness of "Suite Fran?aise" lies in thework, not in the circumstances of its provenance.Actually theauthor has all the lyricism of Tolstoy - and the breadth of vision - but doesn't hammer on about her 'message' as he can do. Think of those passages in Anna Karenina where the great man begins to describe Levin and the ideal life in the country. There is none of this in Suite Francaise. And the wonder of it is that you don't realize the author was a Jew living life on borrowed time , exiled to the French countryside and with the full knowledge of what this invasion meant for her personally and her family. There is no fear in the book. Of course we are reading IreneNemirovsky but every word on the page is Smith's and they are all beautifullychosen to match the lyricism of the original. This is one of the most important books to emerge for years and, it sounds rather plangentbut a triumph of life and art over the forces of death and ignorance.After Iwent through several pages in a bookstore I bought it. It is a valuable,in-depth account for the struggle that the author and so many other souls likehim have gone through in order to survive the horrors of the war. Unfinishedworks embody the passage of time. In addition to "Storm in June" and"Dolce," the two parts that make up "our" Suite Française,Némirovsky envisioned the addition of "Captivity,""Battle," and "Peace." Had she lived to write the book shehd, we would have a vast, extended saga encompassing the Germanoccupation of France, the French reaction and response (including acts ofcollaboration and resistance), the inside story of life in the concentrationcamps, the soldier's perspective from the battlefield, and Europe'sredefinition as a force for peace in the wake of World War II. Rather, we readabout banal, day-to-day injuries and indignities that the French inflicted onone another in the chaos of 1940 and beyond. And many of the well-drawncharacters are women, making this a study in women's lives as well as in thehistory of the German Occupation. But in fact, she was arguably anti-Semitic inher caricatures and comments about Jewish people in her early writings, and inher devotion to the comforts of French culture, even though was never grantedFrench citizenship. In a sense, shewith her privileged upbringing and ties toright-wing journals like Candide and Gringoirecontributed to thesocio-political climate of the France she critiques in Suite Francaise, just asher wealthy, materialistic parents had contributed to the climate that led tothe violence of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This compassionate view ofthe young writer as a woman-in-flux, ever-searching also explains why her thefocus of Suite Française is on the large and small moral dilemmas inherent inpersonal relationships. And there she would belong, among the eloquent exiles.

Resumos Relacionados