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Rating:  -
What I loved about this book was how the author took her familiar French countryside and populated it with characters who go beyond their locale and somehow represent all of humanity, from whatever race or culture. This book, really, is about the regrets and lost passion that come with ageing. I really enjoyed this book and I have to commend Sandra Smith for an excellent translation.
The reason I didn't give it 5 stars, is that it does have an incomplete feeling about it. Also, the war context of Suite Francaise was compelling and intriguing for me, and this is missing here. For what it is, it's excellent and I was not disappointed after reading it. Suite Francaise, afterall, is one of my favorite books of all time. I'm anxious to read the authors other works.
Rating: -
The astonishing story behind Irène Némirovsky's posthumous 2004 novel, Suite Francaise, about life during WWII France is worthy of a book in itself since it was published 62 years after her death in Auschwitz and only after her aged daughter felt ready to read it before passing it to a French archive. Even though it was designed to be five novellas presented as one consolidated work, Némirovsky was able to complete only two, and yet what remains is an absorbing panoramic masterwork. A book of more modest scope, Fire in the Blood, was found among documents that the author left for her publisher before she was deported to the camps.
Even though it was probably unintentional, this 160-page novella feels like an emotional predecessor to the second story in "Suite Francaise", "Dolce", which told of the WWII experiences of several French citizens in a provincial village where a German regiment has just arrived. Némirovsky sets most of her story in "Fire in the Blood" sometime between the world wars in the same village, Issy-l'Eveque. Unlike the other book, she doesn't provide much real-life context to ground the story against a historical background. What she seems to be reaching for is a timeless story of forgiveness centered on the revelation of a youthful love affair and its consequences. Due to her prodigious literary talent, Némirovsky succeeds in many ways but not entirely.
The plot focuses on Silvio, who has spent his youth traveling the world before returning to Issy-l'Eveque and living in seclusion as a farmer. Now in his fifties, he attends the wedding of his cousin Colette, a young woman with "fire in her blood", to a local miller. Begging her parents to share their love story, Colette yearns for a long happy marriage like theirs. A few years later, her husband dies under mysterious circumstances, and Silvio uncovers a web of deceit with life-altering ramifications. This is all handled by Némirovsky with intelligence and her particular powers of observation on full display, but by the end of the book, the story feels frustratingly unfinished. The power of "Suite Francaise" comes from the author's unerring ability to humanize real-life events during WWII, but no such connection is evident here. Much of the lapse is forgivable given her personal circumstances. There is no telling how this book would have evolved if she had an opportunity to do rewrites, but what remains still makes for worthwhile reading.
Rating: -
Irene Nemirovsky's short novel, written before her arrest and subsequent death in Auschwitz in 1942, was considered lost (there was a partial text of the first pages) and was only found on 2007 (!). Nevertheless, everything indicates this is not the final draft, and had she lived to publish it a different version would have arrived to us. The book itself is a tale of secret passions in a French small town. The arrival of Silvio, a single man in his sixties, to his home town, after a lifetime of living abroad, lets secrets hidden under the cover of normalcy and boredom out of the closet; a lot of it it's beguiling, but it also feels incomplete: for example, the relationship between Silvio and Brigitte (fundamental, given what we find in the book's last pages) is curiously underworked: this lets me to think we should consider this book to be an unfinished work. Despite this, it is another fine work by the Russian-born Jewish-raised French author, whose books have gone through a revival in the last few years.
Rating:  -
This was a very enjoyable book. Ms. Nemirovsky has a way of grabbing your attention and then you become totally engrossed in the lives of the people she writes about. She has a way of making each person seem very real!
Rating: -
If you liked Suite Francaise, you will like this novel. It is not an epic masterpiece like SF, but a beautifully written tale that will not disappoint.
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