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Suite Française

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
A lost masterpiece of French literature, this epic novel of life under Nazi occupation was discovered 62 years after the author's tragic death at Auschwitz. Originally intended to be in five parts, the two that form this work are complete in themselves. Part One, "A Storm in June," is set in the chaos and mayhem of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Part Two, "Dolce," opens in the provincial town of Bussy during the first influx of German soldiers. Each part features a rich cast of characters-people who never should have met, but come to form ambiguous relationships as they are forced to endure circumstances beyond their control.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      These recently rediscovered opening sections of a planned five-part novel by Irene Nemirovsky, who died in Auschwitz in 1942, are cause for rejoicing and for deep mourning for what was lost. Daniel Oreskes reads the first novella, a bleak human comedy of Parisians fleeing the city in chaos, rather pointlessly, it turns out, as the Wehrmacht arrives. Barbara Rosenblat performs the second, in which many characters from the first reappear, about the sometimes subtle, sometimes violent tensions in a French farm village under German occupation, as conquerors and conquered, aristocrats and peasants interact in unaccustomed ways. This is complex, polished, and moving work by Nemirovsky, who must have written at breakneck speed, and by two incomparable actors, a virtually flawless production that will repay multiple listenings. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 13, 2006
      Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 5, 2006
      HighBridge has chosen exceptional readers for these remarkable novellas. Oreskes reads "Storm in June" in a clear, low storyteller's voice, changing tone to designate characters without trying to act out or be those characters. He handles Nemirovsky's black humor and irony with intelligence, and understates to great effect reactions from haughtiness to decency in the midst of panic and death as masses suddenly rush from Paris in the wake of Nazi bombings in 1940. Rosenblat has a husky Lauren Bacall voice that draws you into the dialectically complex relationship between French villagers and German occupiers in "Dolce." This is not a diary or a novel written years later in cool contemplation. These are historical novellas written while the author lived through the events. Yet with the detachment of hindsight and the craft of a fine, experienced author (she had successfully published nine novels), Nemirovsky shapes into novel form the stories of a small gallery of French Parisians and villagers and occupying German officers and soldiers, each with his or her national and personal idiosyncrasies and destinies. This was to have been the first of five novellas in an ongoing war saga, but in 1942 the Germans discovered the Jewish writer living in a small village. She was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, and died a month later. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 13).

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This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Funding for additional materials was made possible by a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.