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Suite Française (精装)
by Irene Némirovsky
| Category:
World War II, French society during WWII, History of Europe, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
MSL price:
¥ 248.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A remarkable piece of art and a captivating blend of fiction and fact, history and storytelling, this book is a WWII classic of chaos, fear and loss. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 15 items |
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Cathleen McGuigan (Newsweek) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
Stories about World War II seem to occur in black and white, all grainy and bleak. That makes the stunning novel Suite Française, about the German occupation of France, all the more remarkable. As the book opens and the Nazis approach the outskirts of Paris, the June skies are gorgeously bright; later, the narrative is rich with evocations of blossoms and trees heavy with fruit, of fragrant air and the sounds of birds - as well as a scene where a cat claws a bird to death and stabs its tiny heart. Lush beauty is the backdrop to dark events, and so is natural cruelty. The characters who populate this sweeping saga of violence and survival - and who exhibit far more self-interest than virtue - are described with the same gleaming precision. The author of Suite Française is one of the most fascinating literary figures you’ve never heard of - and her own tragic story only deepens the impact of her book... The [book’s] first part, "Storm in June," depicts in brilliant detail the tumultuous exodus from Paris in the summer of 1940... There are harrowing scenes on the roads jammed with refugees... The second part, "Dolce," is quieter, if no less ominous. Set in an occupied village, it delineates the tangled emotions of the conquered and the conquerors... Suite Française - gripping, clear-eyed and lyrical–doesn’t seem incomplete. Yet as wonderful as it is, when you read Némirovsky’s notes, included in an appendix, you see the scope of her ambition and you mourn. She was planning a kind of War and Peace for the 20th century and, tragically, she never saw how her story could end.
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
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... 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.
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Booklist (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
A grandly symphonic, courageous, and scathing work... Suite Française is a magnificent novel of the insidious devastation of occupation, and Némirovsky is brilliant and heroic, summoning up profound empathy for all, including regretful German soldiers. Everything about this transcendent novel is miraculous.
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The New York Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
Stunning... A tour de force of narrative distillation, using a handful of people to represent a multitude. Némirovsky’s shifts in tone and pace, sensitively rendered in Sandra Smith’s graceful translation, are mesmerizing... She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and inclusive fiction that conflict has produced.
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The Independent (MSL quote), UK
<2007-02-25 00:00>
A magnificent work that its readers will cherish for as long as they still care about the art of fiction or the history of Europe. Even more astonishing, given its heroically large themes and the desperate circumstances of its composition, this is no gloomy elegy but a scintillating panorama of a people in crisis - witty, satirical, romantic, waspish and gorgeously lyrical by turns. Every page shines both with a ravishing delight in the surfaces of life, and a profound empathy for the souls of its characters, that raises it to the rank of the Russian and French masters.
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Helen Dunmore (The Guardian) (MSL quote), UK
<2007-02-25 00:00>
The history of the manuscript, and its survival, is remarkable enough. The authority of the novel, though, does not come from its history, but from its quality... The narrative is eloquent and glowing with life. Its tone reflects a deep understanding of human behaviour under pressure and a hard-won, often ironic composure in the face of violation... Even in its incomplete form Suite Française is one of those rare books that demands to be read. |
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Alan Cheuse (NPR) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
Beautifully restrained... [Némirovsky’s] talent was quite considerable and her personal story rather moving and tragic... I don’t know of a more striking recent case where biography and artistic accomplishment are so intertwined... Némirovsky left behind [a note] about how to compose the projected later volumes of this novel project: "The most important and most interesting thing here is the following: the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life... must be described in detail." This she did rather splendidly in the first two books. |
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Sharon Dilworth (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
Transcendent, astonishing... Suite Française, which might be the last great fiction of the war, provides us with an intimate recounting of occupation, exodus and loss. [Its] staggering power is that it affirms the idea that art can offer a path to salvation... This might be the most moving novel I will ever read... Like Anne Frank, Irène Némirovsky was unaware of neither her circumstance nor the growing probability that she might not survive. And still, she writes to us.
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Alice Kaplan (The Nation) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
Compelling, gripping... A brilliant portrait of French society in 1940... It rivals the story of Anne Frank’s diary, or the story of Albert Camus’s novel The First Man... Suite Française raises fascinating questions about what matters in the experience of reading: content or context. The context of Suite Française is endlessly fascinating. Then there is the novel itself[:] a society novel [but] a great one, in the devastating tradition of Edith Wharton... [Némirovsky wrote] with supreme lucidity [and] expressed with great emotional precision her understanding of the country that betrayed her.
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Kim Allen-Niesen (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-25 00:00>
One of the first books of WWII, but only published now, it gives a fascinating insight to the invasion of France. It is the first two books of what was planned as a 5 book compiliation, following the structure of a musical suite.
The first book chroniciles the evacuation of Paris. It feels very timely for those of us living in a metropolitan area. I wondered how I would react if my city was hit with a "dirty bomb" or something that would make us all leave in terror. When do we lose our capacity to care and assist others? What will we do to survive in a similar situation? It's a question that we all have answers we would like to give, but until tested it's hard to really know what is important to us and what values we will live into when survival is questionable.
The second book examines the reaction to the German occupation of a small town in France. It is easy to hate the Germans/invaders/occupiers, but harder to hate the individual solider that is living in your home and whom you start to appreciate beyond the uniform.
The book was written during the war, before the horrors of WWII were common knowledge and gives another perspective of the war. One strain of the French reaction to the invasion is 'we occupied the Germans in the last war and now they'll occupy us, following the same rules of behaviour'. Of course, the current reader knows that WWII was very different, but only because we have hindsight.
The appendix is fascinating and heart breaking. The author's notes give a unique insight into a writer's mind. The fate of the family is tragic, it is this portion of the book that causes people to classify it as a holocaust book; however, the subject matter of both two novels did not touch on the holocaust. |
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 15 items |
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