SUITE FRANÇAISE – Review by MaryAnn Johanson
The story of how Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite Française became known to the world is amazing. She wrote it as contemporary fiction inspired by the events she was living through — the defeat of France by the Nazis in 1940, and the subsequent German occupation — but then it was lost, packed away unread, until the 1990s, and finally published only in 2004. Her fiction is a time capsule of the moment of its creation, reflecting the thinking and feeling of a time before any hindsight on the war was possible. It is not memory or history — it is now. Just a different now from our own. Read more>>