newcritics

Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn’t sleep – the ill and bedridden, the mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn’t long before the wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, “Is it an air raid?”

So begins Suite Francaise by Irène Nemirovksy. Her book has cinematic sweeps, moving from the general psyche to individuals. You can see the broad shot, setting the stage, as the director moves in closely to the main characters. Her gorgeous descriptions and put you in the moment, and you can hear and see the surroundings, smell the flowers in the trees.

It’s another WWII book, this time in France, during the Nazi occupation. It’s cinematic in its scope and description, and absolutely beautiful. Nemirovksy wrote from her experiences in France during the war. Book one is set in Paris, as the Nazis march in and Parisians decide whether or not to make an exodus into the countryside. Book two follows a country town during its occupation, and how the inhabitants and occupiers interact. She captures humanity in its many guises and foibles well.

Her book was supposed to be made of five sections, but she was killed in Auschwitz after only two were completed. Her daughters kept her notebooks without knowing what was in them for fifty years, only to have it published recently.

She wanted five sections, to mirror a symphony’s five movements, to have her stories expand like music. In the extensive, and fascinating, notes section, she quotes E.M. Forster, from Aspects of a Novel:

Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does off in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, and they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is there not something of it in War and Peace?

I love that idea of expansion, intersecting music and literature. Although I don’t think it is limited to those art forms. Nevertheless, I think she accomplishes expansion in her novels. This book is powerful and beautiful and I urge you to put it on your reading list. Make sure to read the notes section as well, as you can read her plans for the remaining books, as well as letters and more information about her life.

Cross-posted.