A Masterpiece Ripped from Oblivion

A Masterpiece Ripped from Oblivion

Like the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, whom I have found myself reading two and three times in my life thus far, this literary French diptych written during war-torn and occupied France in the early 1940s is equally well worth reading several times.  The Italian literary scholar, novelist and professor, Umberto Eco, avers that we read literature to learn how to die.  I would add to that that we read literature, like we participate in all cultural traditions, including religion, to learn how to live as well as how to die.  This is one of those books that has the potential to teach us much about valuing the all-too-fragile lives with which we have been gifted.

Irene Némirovski's (1903, Kiev – 1942) wonderful masterpiece, which has only quite recently been published under the title Suite Francaise, fits in quite rightly with all great literature by portraying humankind in all its highs and lows and, through it all, manages to present our humanity in such a moving way as to be meaning-seeking and meaning-making.  My title for this post is taken from the French newspaper Le Monde's review of the novel, which describes it as "a masterpiece... ripped from oblivion."  As the title reveals, this work is actually a suite of novellas or a diptych of stories that depict what it was like during the Nazi invasion of France.  These stories were only discovered in the late 1990s when Némirovski's older daughter, Denise, who had kept the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, thinking that it was a journal or diary of her mother's.  She had never read it because she thought it would be far too painful an exercise for her. In the late 1990s, as she aged, however, Denise made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive and decided to examine the notebook first. Upon discovering what it contained, she had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004. It has since been translated into 38 languages and, as of 2008, had sold 2.5 million copies. 

My English edition is published by Chatto & Windus, London, 2006.  The translation is superbly rendered by Sandra Smith, who has translated all of Nemirovsky's novels. What makes this novel is its universal appeal insofar as its themes are what I have called "meaning-seeking" and "meaning-making" ones in the tradition of the great Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  This novel is a thinking man's and a thinking woman's novel in this same tradition.  It deals with the universal themes of life and death, distilled into the space of a little over a year, as our author Irene was to die (or more correctly was to be murdered) tragically in the Auschwitz death camp. This novel is a distillation of humankind's search for ultimate meaning, or even any little crumb of meaning, as the pincer grip of the Nazi German war machine moved inexorably inwards on Paris. 

The first novella of the diptych, entitled aptly Storm in June, is an intensely written and accurately distilled account of what it must feel like to be a hunted animal before the inevitable kill.  It is written with consummate style, which captures the gut-gripping fear of the cornered quarry.  The magnitude of the fall of a nation, coupled with the inevitable fear of personal annihilation, makes this a gripping read. Némirovsky, unlike Tolstoy, does not evoke big and bloody battles or the rattle of sabres or the thunderous fire of huge guns or even the machinations and intrigues of the quarrelling politicians.  Rather, in the line of the existentialists, she evokes with consummate ease and an accurate eye the lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of Paris, France.

Her style is clipped and sharp, and precise.  The opening sentence of the first chapter is a mere four words in length: "Hot, thought the Parisians." (p. 3) The hands and the foreheads of the citizens are sweaty with anxiety.  She writes of the fears of women whose men were at the front, and of their jumpiness and anxiety as they hear the distant bombs exploding.  She even brings us into the dreams of these fearful people and what it was like to have nightmares that blend so well with the reality their dreamers were experiencing when awake.  Némirovsky paints the Parisians as hunted animals:

The wealthy simply went to sit with the concierge, straining to hear the shells bursting... their bodies as tense as frightened animals in dark woods as the hunter gets closer.  Though the poor were just as afraid as the rich, and valued their lives just as much, they were more sheep-like: they needed each other, needed to link arms, to groan or laugh together. (p.4)

In this intense writing style, she continues to distil the feelings of the ordinary people of France as the jackboots of the German Nazis marched closer and closer.  We are brought into the minds of young and old, the living and the dying.  We are spared nothing.  Her style is ruthlessly honest. We feel that we are as powerless as the poor, frightened citizens of Paris awaiting their conquerors.  The children lay asleep "against their mothers' sides, their lips making sucking noises, like little lambs."  All this animal imagery makes us think, of course, of lambs to the slaughter.

    Let me advert here to one major factor I found in Némirovski's style, that is, her depiction of nature. She does not do so in the traditional way, that is, in a Shakespearean or Worsworthian fashion. What I mean here is that Némirovski is such a modern writer that she is firmly in the tradition of existentialist writers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Like them, she paints nature as vastly and completely indifferent to the feelings of human beings.  Nature is nature and is unaffected by our feelings.  The sun comes up and goes down, the moon and stars come out and go in, and the cycles of daytime and nighttime merely continue unaffected by the suffering and pain, or, indeed, by the very consciousness of humankind. Némirovski captures this quintessentially existentialist experience with supreme skill.  Here is how she finishes the first chapter with the sounds of war not too far away:

The sun came up, fiery red, in a cloudless sky.  A shell was fired, now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument, birds rose into the sky.  Great black birds, rarely seen at other times, stretched out their pink-tinged wings.  Beautiful fat pigeons cooed; swallows wheeled; sparrows hopped peacefully in the deserted streets.  Along the Seine, each poplar tree held a cluster of little brown birds who sang as loudly as they could. From deep beneath the ground came the muffled noise everyone had been waiting for, a sort of three-tone fanfare.  The air raid was over. (p. 5)

Not much pathetic fallacy here, that sympathy of nature with humankind, defined by the great Victorian critic Ruskin. No indeed. This is the Nietzschean nightmare come true.  Némirovski writes with an intensity only those living in fear can appreciate.  There is a sense of fear and urgency, and even a feeling of hope, despite one's worst fears, that our author manages to capture in Suite Francaise.  In chapter two, she introduces us to an upper-middle-class family who have a valet, a cook and a chauffeur - this is the Péricand family, who, with many thousands of other Parisians, decide to flee Paris as the Germans are approaching.  In this chapter, we get a sense of fear and expectation, mixed with a sense of finality as the end of things as the Parisians know them approaches.  The Péricands have to abandon all their worldly goods and with them that sense of meaning and purpose and station that such goods tend to superficially give humans.  Once again, their fears are offset by the indifference of insentient nature.

In chapter three, we are introduced to the egotistical and self-satisfied writer and literary figure M. Gabriel Corte.  He is an aesthete along the lines of Oscar Wilde, with a candidature in progress for the Académie Francaise, a writer who could only write "if he had a small glass bowl of deep lapis lazuli beside him." (p.15). This man is so egotistical, self-centred, and almost solipsistic that he curses the war solely because it is destroying his imagination and preventing him from being creative. His mistress, Florence, decides to pack a sturdy suitcase with both their prize possessions - his manuscripts and her jewellery only to find that they would not all fit in and that the manuscripts would have to be hidden in her hat box.

     In chapter five, we are introduced to one good, happy family unit, namely that of the Michauds, who are low-level bank officials.  They are a happy and satisfied couple who stick together and somehow manage to keep their dignity intact, despite the evil and hatred stirred up by the various ideologies.  Then, we are introduced to the headstrong bank manager M. Corbin and his mistress Mademoiselle Arlette Corail, a dancer.  With Madame Michaud, the more junior banker in the outer office, we overhear Corbin and his mistress arguing about how they are to flee Paris.  In all this confusion, the Michauds were, unlike Corbin and his mistress, more worried about the fate of their son, who was in the army and was set to face head-on the incoming Germans. Certainly, they were fearful for themselves, but not for their precious goods, which they might have amassed were they luckier in life, like such as Corbin and his ilk.  The Michaud world was essentially a less material and more spiritual one.  

Then, in chapter six, we read of the absolute confusion which existed at all the train stations in Paris:

But at all those stations, the gates were already closed and guarded by soldiers.  The crowds were hanging onto them, shaking them, then swarming chaotically back down the neighbouring streets.  Women in tears were running with their children in their arms.  The last taxis were stopped: they were offered two thousand, three thousand francs to leave Paris.  "Just to Orléans..."  But the drivers refused, they had no more petrol. (p. 29) 

We can almost experience the fear and panic that gripped these Parisians in the pit of their stomachs.  Némirovski is at her best as she captures this fear and panic, nay this sense of impending doom, as the normal lives of people were now forever shattered under the jackboots of the conquering Germans.  It is as if Armageddon has arrived.  One can feel the terror, confusion and sheer anxiety in the following rather long paragraph:

All along the Boulevard Delessert, groups of people appeared outside their houses - women, old people and children, gesticulating to each other, trying, at first calmly and then with increasing agitation and a mad, dizzy excitement, to get the family and all the baggage into a Renault, a saloon, a sports car... Not a single light shone through the windows.  The stars were coming out, springtime stars with a silvery glow.  Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper.  In the darkness, the danger seemed to grow.  You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence.  Even people who were normally calm and controlled were overwhelmed by anxiety and fear.  Everyone looked at their house and thought, "Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I'll have nothing left.  We haven't hurt anyone. Why?"  Then a wave of indifference washed over their souls:  "What's the difference?  It's only stone, wood - nothing living!  What matters is survival!"  Who cared about the tragedy of their country?  Not these people, not the people who were leaving that night.  Panic obliterated everything that wasn't animal instinct, involuntary physical reaction.  Grab the most valuable things you own in the world and then...!  And, on that night, only people - the living and the breathing, the crying and the loving - were precious.  Rare was the person who cared about their possessions; everyone wrapped their arms tightly around their wife or child, and nothing else mattered; the rest could go up in flames.  (p. 30)

How could a writer possibly create a better paragraph to capture the sheer terror, confusion and anxiety that would have gripped all the inhabitants of Paris the night before the Germans calmly rolled in on their conquered quarry?  The style of this paragraph is direct and visceral.  She mentions the smells of Paris - the smells of fear in the very air and the instinctual reactions of the natives.  We are not alone brought into their minds, which are flooded with confusing and terrifying thoughts, but also into their very gut reactions.  This is writing at its most intense, at its most existential, at its acutest.  Throughout it all, though, the writer is in control, not lost... she, like an objective observer, is recounting the whole experience of Paris falling apart and being crushed under the boot of the Germans, like a Buddhist meditator observing her breath.  This is what makes Némirovski such a brilliant writer and such a loss to have perished so young in Hitler's gas chambers and crematoria at the notorious death camp of Auschwitz.

   

Suite Francaise

This is a book written by one who is very much the quarry or the hunted, and she communicates that to us in an equally intense but very clipped, exact and succinct style.  Like all good novelists, indeed, like good writers of any and every genre, there is never a redundant word.  Bad books need a lot of editing.  This is a brilliant book, and one could expand and expatiate on every paragraph because it is so intense and so succinctly written.  As I've said already, it's like a distillation of experience.  There is not a single redundant word.

Also, as I reiterate too much, this is an existentialist book; it is suffused with existentialist themes:

(i) Firstly, there is the feeling and thinking subject, who is not an object that has to be predicted or manipulated. The object may be the essence of the thing, while the subject is the existing feeling and thinking actor, as it were. What does it mean to be a subject? What does it mean to be a conscious being? “Existentialism says I am nothing else but my own conscious existence.”

(ii) The theme of anxiety is at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread of the nothingness of human existence.  Némirovski's book is suffused with existential anxiety - sheer angst.

 (iii) A third theme would be that of absurdity. I am basically my existence, and it is absurd. Why am I thrown into this existence here? Why here? Why now? After all, we are utterly contingent beings. In other words, we are not logically necessary at all. We did not have to exist. And so our life is an absurd contingent fact. How many of us have stated something such as this to our parents or other significant adults: “I did not ask to be born!”  This sense of absurdity also suffuses Suite Francaise.  Why did this absurd war have to happen anyway?  Why all this chaos?  Why all this hate?  Why all this death?  Why? Why? Why?  Where's the rhyme and where's the reason for all this?

Némirovski introduces us to many characters who illustrate the theme of the absurdity of existence.  However, to my mind at least, one character epitomises this trait, and he is Charles Langelet - a shallow culture vulture, an art and porcelain collector. How well chosen, then, is the object of his adoration - porcelain - so brittle, so fragile like life itself! Némirovski is at her best here. This character is a shallow man, a cultured man, yes, but as the German war machine rolls inexorably in, his culture counts for nothing as the drive to survival and the animal instincts of all take over. We see a man who, while he has a cultural base, has no spiritual one. This cultured man, this Charles Langelet, tells us: 

I cannot bear all this chaos, these outbursts of hatred, the repulsive spectacle of war. I shall withdraw to a tranquil spot in the countryside and live on the bit of money I have left until everyone comes to their senses. (p. 35)

Némirovski paints Langelet as a self-centred egotist and an aesthete who has no deeper values than the worship of his fragile porcelain. For him, routine is everything - even the way he bosses about his servants. We first meet him as he feverishly tries to pack away his precious possessions lest the Nazi hordes get them. He is visibly, and almost audibly, as Némirovski writes so well, sweating and grunting as he tries to seal his tea chests of precious items of art and porcelain. This man, when he runs out of petrol on his flight from Paris, dupes a young couple with his beautiful and sophisticated words, telling them that he will watch their car while they sleep, and goes on to steal their cans of petrol and heads away. He is shallow, unfeeling toward others and self-serving to a great degree.

(iv) A fourth concern in existentialism is that of our dissolution into nothingness. Here is where I, as the existential being, the conscious subject, rejecting all philosophies and theories that seek to define me objectively, strip away all these external structures or scaffolding to get at the real "me". Then what am I left with? Following Kierkegaard’s lead, I am left with absolutely nothing by way of structure. It is here that I stand in anguish at the edge of the abyss. All the characters in Suite Francaise stand on the edge of the abyss.

(iv) A fifth concern in existentialism is dread or fear: I say this not to put the would-be reader off, but rather to inspire the reader to go out and buy this book and read it many times if possible.  We need to be frightened because another Holocaust and World War (Three or Four) could happen sometime.  They say that we read history to learn from our mistakes.  Reading good literature and attending good drama can and do bring home the same important message in a more personally disturbing way.  It is with the same idea in mind, the same trepidation that I read the writings that sprang from the great Holocaust, like those of Ann Frank, Elie Wiesel, Paul Célan and Primo Levi.  Lest such depravity happen again, we must read such literature.  We need to be aware of the depths to which humankind is capable of descending.

In summary, then, we may say that this is a beautifully written book. All good literature is well written.  This hardly needs to be said, but let me say it anyway.  If a story is good and is written badly, it will never sell.  All publishers know this. It will be only told orally in some company, in some pub or hostelry or other.  If a good story is told well, it hits home.  If it is subsequently written well, it will sell equally well.  A good story, well written, touches our hearts and our souls.  It enters deep within us, disturbs us, moves us, and makes us laugh and cry by turns.  It gives us insights into our world as human beings.  Such writers, who are gifted with the power of expression in words, weave a world that we as readers can imaginatively and hence really inhabit.  It is the writer's power of description that lifts us from our quotidian routine into a world of experience beyond our physical senses.  Indeed, their words bring us on a transportation of soul and self into a mystical world we can share even with an author long dead.  Coleridge defined style as the right word in the right place.  Némirovski is possessed of this ability to a superb degree, so much so that, in my estimation, she is a wonderful exponent of great style.