French Suite (nemilovsky Collection)
About This Novel
After more than half a century of silence, Nemirovsky's posthumous work "Suite Française" was finally published in 2004, and won the Renaudot Literary Award that year. The prize, awarded for the first time to a late author, also brought Nemirovsky's legend back into the public eye. The novel was supposed to be composed of five different "movements" (see Appendix 1 "Manuscript Notes" of this book), but Nemilovsky only had time to finish writing the first two movements before he was killed by the Nazis. The first movement "June Storm" depicts the great escape from Paris in 1940, grimly outlining the various behaviors of capitalists, civilians, soldiers and farmers on the escape route. The second movement "Adagio" moves from the road to a small town, where a subtle confrontation and affection unfolds between the small town residents and the German soldiers. The fate of each named person, the undelivered bad news, the unfinished love, and the unacted awakening all push the narrative charm of the realist novel to its peak. Now here's a more prosaic question that I've never been able to find an answer to: Don't people forget the characters from the previous book when they read the next one? It is to avoid this that I am going to write a work of a thousand pages instead of one consisting of several volumes. --Jelena Nemirovsky
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