First Monday

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas. (Apr. 18)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
This extraordinary work of fiction about the German occupation of France is embedded in a real story as gripping and complex as the invented one. Composed in 1941-42 by an accomplished writer who had published several well-received novels, Suite Française, her last work, was written under the tremendous pressure of a constant danger that was to catch up with her and kill her before she had finished.

Irène Némirovsky was a Jewish, Russian immigrant from a wealthy family who had fled the Bolsheviks as a teenager. She spent her adult life in France, wrote in French but preserved the detachment and cool distance of the outsider. She and her husband were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was gassed upon arrival and she died in the infirmary at the age of 39. Her manuscript, in minuscule and barely readable handwriting, was preserved by her daughters, who, ignorant of the fact that these notebooks contained a full-fledged masterpiece, left it unread until 60 years later. Once published, with an appendix that illuminates the circumstances of its origin and the author's plan for its completion, it quickly became a bestseller in France. It is hard to imagine a reader who will not be wholly engrossed and moved by this book.

Némirovsky's plan consisted of five parts. She completed only the first two before she was murdered. Yet they are not fragmentary; they read like polished novellas. The first, "Storm in June," gives us a cross section of the population during the initial exodus from the capital, when a battle for Paris was expected and people fled helter-skelter south, so that the roads were clogged with refugees of all classes. Némirovsky shows how much caste and money continued to matter, how the nation was not united in the face of danger and a common enemy. In her account, the well-to-do continue to be especially egotistical and petty. And yet a deep, unsentimental sympathy pervades this panorama. Looking up to the sky at enemy planes overhead, the refugees who have to sleep on the street or in their cars "lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them." I can't think of a more chilling and concise image to convey the helplessness of civilians in an air raid.

Not being French herself but steeped in French culture may have made it easier for Némirovsky to achieve her penetrating insights with Flaubertian objectivity. She gives us startling, steely etched sketches of both collaboration and resistance among people motivated by personal loyalties and grievances that date from before the war.

The second part, "Dolce" (the title -- Italian for "sweet" -- derives from Némirovsky's plan to give the work a musical structure), covers the occupation by the Germans of a small village, from the so-called armistice in June 1940 to the Soviet Union's entry into the war a year later. One can forget that there was a period after the defeat of France when World War II could be seen simply as a war between Germany and Britain. The villagers yearn for peace, and many are indifferent as to who wins, England or Germany, as long as their own men come home. Némirovsky is superb in describing how fraternization comes about, including French girls and women giving in to the attractions of the handsome German occupants -- there are no other men around, most of the French men having been taken prisoner. But the unnatural situation also breeds fierce feelings of resentment and humiliation. Némirovsky embodies this conflict in the story of a woman who falls in love with a German officer and at the same time hides a villager wanted for the murder of another German -- a murder motivated partly by patriotic hatred and partly by marital jealousy.

One puzzling omission from the spectrum of conquered and cowering French society is the Jews -- the one group that was more endangered than any other, as Némirovsky knew only too well. Perhaps she wanted to save the fate of the Jews for the next part, which was to be entitled "Captivity." Even so, when one thinks of the threat the Jewish population endured even at this early stage of persecution, one feels the significant gap here.

Still, this is an incomparable book, in some ways sui generis. While diaries give us a day-to-day record, their very inclusiveness can lead to tedium; memoirs, on the other hand, written at a later date, search for highlights and illuminate the past from the vantage point of the present. In Némirovsky's Suite Française we have the perfect mixture: a gifted novelist's account of a foreign occupation, written while it was taking place, with history and imagination jointly evoking a bitter time, correcting and enriching our memory.

Reviewed by Ruth Kluger
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

January 7 – A Certain Slant of Light by Cynthia Thayer
February 4 – Without a Map: A Memoir by Meredith Hall
March 3 – Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson (Community Read choice)
April 7 – Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
May 5 – Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission… by Greg Mortensen
June 2 – Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
July 7 - Chant to Soothe the Wild Elephants: a Memoir by Jaed Coffin, local author
August 4 - In preparation for author visits here in September we will discuss Sarah Graves and Katharine Hall Page various books,- read as many as you can.
September 8 - In preparation for author visits here in October, we will discuss the work of Julia Spencer-Fleming and Tess Gerritsen,- read as many of their books as you can.
October 6
November 3
December 1

2007
January 8 – The March by E.L. Doctorow
February 5 – Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
March 5 – Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – this the 2007 Community Read selection
April 2 – Garbage Land: on the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte
May 7 – Snow by Orhan Pamuk
June 4 – The Road by Cormac McCarthy
July 2 – Spoonhandle by Ruth Moore
August 6 – The Sea by John Banville
September 10 – Rowan Head by Elizabeth Ogilvie
October 1 – Faithful Traveler: a Father, a Daughter, a Fly-Fishing Journey of the Heart by James Dodson
November 5 – Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood
December 3 – A Certain Slant of Light by Cynthia Thayer (cancelled due to weather)

2006
January 9 – Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott
February 6 – Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
March 6 – The Bone People by Keri Hulme
April 3 – The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong
May 1 – Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan
June 5 - The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
July 10 – Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
August 7 – Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
September 11 – The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
October 2 – The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
November 6 – The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham

2005
June 6 – The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
July 11 – Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
August 1 – The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
August 29 – The Walk Down Main Street by Ruth Moore
October 3 - The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
November 7 – Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
December 5 – Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
December 4 – Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines

The Monday afternoon book discussion group formed at the Curtis Memorial Library in May 2005. The group meets the first Monday of each month, with adjustments for holidays. Everyone who has read the book and would like to talk about it is welcome to attend meetings and join the discussion. Some people come every month; others drop in when their schedules permit or a title appeals to them. Books are readily available for borrowing through the MINERVA network. For information please call Janet at
725-5242 ext. 229.