IN PARIS IN THOSE DAYS:

Around the world in literary ways (Peter Kemp, 11/26/06, Times of London)

SUITE FRANCAISE by Irène Némirovsky translated by Sandra Smith

The year’s great literary discovery. More than half a century after Irène Némirovsky, a Russian-born novelist deported from France under the race laws, died in Auschwitz, one of her daughters opened a leather notebook she had left behind, and found an unfinished novel. While its later parts never got beyond intensely fascinating notes, the first two sections (essentially, free-standing novellas) are masterpieces. One depicts the fall of Paris in 1940; the other, the occupation of a village deep in the French countryside. Riveting biographical material included in this book shows the nightmare conditions in which these beautifully subtle, unillusioned and generous-spirited works were composed. Written not just about a terrible cataclysm but from the heart of it, combining documentary fascination with fictional power, Suite Française is a triumph of both human indomitability and literary genius.