Last week I reviewed “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernieres and felt that it was tedious, brilliant, and ended in a completely different fashion than I would have finished it. The story was beautiful, but there were flaws that left me dissatisfied. This week I will share a book that tells nearly the same story, but leaves me with a feeling of completeness and healing, despite the fact that the book will never be finished by the author. This book is “Suite Française” by Irène Némirovsky/

Némirovsky, a Jew was born in Ukraine and educated at the Sorbonne. She and her family fled Russia to Paris to elude the Nazis in the early 1940’s where she wrote two of a planned five stories that would make up “Suite Française.” Unfortunately, .she and her family were arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1942 where she died in the camp. Her young daughters hid this manuscript and brought it out 65 years later to be published.

“Suite Française” is set in France from 1940-1941 with the first story, “A Storm in June” telling of the mass exodus of Paris at the time of the Nazi invasion and the second story, “Dolce” relating the experiences of a small provincial farming community that is occupied by German troops.
The story of “A Storm in June” is darkly humorous, telling how the lives of several characters become intertwined. There are those who feel they are above all the riff raff who must deal with the new reality of shortages, lines, ration cards, the inability to work, drive, or carry on their old lives. These uppercrust elitists get their just rewards in some very surprising ways.
The story line of “Dolce” is quite similar to that of “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernieres in that there are always similarities when a country is invaded and occupied by the soldiers of another country. The soldiers become part of the community, filling the places of the young men who left their own homes to fight a war and are now in prison camps. Wives and girlfriends are left behind and find themselves having to rely on their own fortitude to run the farm, take care of their families and deal with the occupiers. As in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” a soldier who was a musician in real life is an officer in charge of men, and billeted in the home of a young woman. This young woman is married instead of affianced, but Lucile in France is very much like Pelagia from Greece in that she is not in love with her philandering husband. Lucile’s mother-in-law loves her son deeply and feels that Lucile is a betrayer to her marriage just by enjoying life while her son Gaston is suffering. Lucile and Pelagia are both strong and though they fall in love with their occupier soldiers, they both choose to wait until after the war to act on their love.
Némirovsky manages to make the same points as de Bernieres without the tedious blocks of narrative relating history in enormous words, epistles that become dark and gloomy, or the mad ravings of a dictator on the verge of collapse. Everything I found disagreeable in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” was turned right in “Suite Française.” The characters still exhibited all the best and worst of people in a time of war and suffered the consequences, without resorting to long passages devoted to battle, deprivation, physical abuse or vulgarity. I still felt the impact of the idiocy of war without the dread and disgust I felt while reading “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.” Némirovsky gave me the opportunity to see all the ugliness without dragging me right down into fox holes and without shouldering a rifle myself.
I recommend “Suite Française” to anyone wishing to read of the second world war without walking away muddied and bloodied.