Sensational simplicity in Suite Francaise

I hate Hitler.

I know that's how millions feel and it's how I've felt since as a child I first learned of the horrors of World War II, but last night when I completed the book Suite Francaise, I hated the evil villain of world history anymore.

He stole the lives of millions of Jews, Gypsys, homosexuals and more and last night he stole the words of an amazing author and her uncompleted manuscript.

Irene Nemirovsky's work in Suite Francaise was pure genius. Although she only completed two of the five sections that were to be a complete set, the moments she captured in black and white on a page of cramped handwriting shown a light on the raw emotion, humanity and reality of life in France during World War II.

Reading Nemirovsky's notes on her work, included in the recent English translation, was riveting. Her eye for contrast and simplicity helped her to weave a tale of life, death, fear and even love in an environment unknown to many readers.

Her simply constructed scenes are like opening the curtain to an elaborate set and watching life reveal itself in moments of reality. She captures the children scampering in a long deserted garden, and the women in black who simply want a photo album and a few items from the home they once treasured.

She illustrated how love can cross barriers of society and family and develop in the most alarming, yet obvious places. Her words - each one - whisper of a life lived in the time of her characters, of experiences survived, of choices made and most of all of truth.

Completing Suite Francaise is disappointing. The book, you think shouldn't end. And it shouldn't. At least not where it does. Three more parts were to reveal for all us what happened to Lucille, Jean-Marie, Hubert, Corte, the Michauds and the others. Nemirovsky pulls her reader in, touching them on the emotional level with the fear of war, the physical level with her descriptions of the difficult life they faced - limited food (even the obsession of food among those fleeing Paris) - and the mental level as the readers struggles along with the characters over the occupying forces, the threatening Bolsheviks and the precarious promise of rescue from England and the United States.

Without Nemirovsky there can be no end to the book. Hitler stole her from her two daughters, her husband and her readers. Dying in a concentration camp for having Jewish grandparents, the Catholic and two-decade French resident Nemirovsky left her daughters with a gift in the form of a manuscript that the world is just beginning to recognize. The value of the glimpse she provided to all of us, even now, six decades after World War II restructured the globe, is one that should be read, celebrated and remembered.


Hitler stole the ending to Suite Francaise, but Nemirovsky captured her world for all of us to remember.