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Title details for Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky - Available

Suite Francaise

by Irene Nemirovsky
Daniel Oreskes
Audiobook
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By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece
The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 16, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780804148733
      • File size: 380987 KB
      • Duration: 13:13:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • 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).

    • 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

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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