A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction

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 and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.

Her comedy is unfailingly black, but no less amusing for that, its success due to her assured sense of daily life's minor absurdities. One of the great strengths of Suite Française is Némirovsky's ability to view larger, collective aspects of the cataclysm through the prism of the personal. The reaction of a young peasant woman to the officer billeted in her home runs in an instant through the gamut of emotions with which her country responds to the occupation on a larger scale.

It was strange: she didn't hate the Germans-she didn't hate anyone -but the sight of that uniform seemed to change her from a free and proud person into a sort of slave, full of cunning, caution and fear, skilful at cajoling the conquerors while hissing "I hope they drop dead!" behind closed doors ... She was ashamed of herself.

But Némirovsky still cannot quite resist the temptation of the broad brushstroke. None of the well-to-do or even comfortably off in Suite Francaisezre admirable. Even the Pericands' eldest son, Father Philippe, who has renounced worldly goods, suffers from excess-a wealth of hypocritical piety. Father Philippe has been charged with evacuating a group of delinquents who had been housed in the institution set up by his grandfather. He prays constantly for the strength to overcome his instinctive dislike for the boys under his care. The boys intuit his disgust as acutely as dogs smell fear. When he tries to stop them from raiding an abandoned château, they stone him to death. The only unqualifiedly good French characters are the Michaud family and Lucile. The peasants are generally good but motivated primarily by selfishness or tribal interest.

In contrast, the German soldiers are implausibly cultured. Bruno von FaIk reads classics in several languages, plays the piano with sensitivity and taste, and had even wanted to be a composer. One of his subordinates plays the violin. He packs his instrument and a few gardening books to take to the Eastern front because as a civilian he designs classical gardens in the style of Louis XIV. The lieutenant shot for flirting with a farmer's wife who reminded him of a portrait from the Flemish school was "gifted at all the arts" and susceptible to "intellectual and sensual intoxication." The farmer himself, who shot him, can barely get a sentence out. Madame Angellier happily risks her life to save the farmer, but, when he is hidden in her home, she is careful not to serve him anything better than table wine. The French in Suite Française are almost all suspicious of music and jealous of their possessions, even if these are just gaudy vases kept only for fear of offending the relative who had made a present of them.

Whether in the hands of Jewish financiers or the French middle class, wealth is still the poison. The element of caricature, so disastrous to Némirovsky's early fiction, persists in Suite Française but is muted and ironized enough to be occasionally revelatory rather than simply deadening.