Canter Bridge

This is a book of which the appendices are capable of making their reader weep.

And weep, one should.

Irene Nemirovsky’s stories and the almost incredible story of how this lost manuscript only recently came to light after the author was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 (her husband died a similar death at the hands of the same villains a bit later) thrust one into the deepest, most senseless excesses of Europe’s twentieth-century self-mutilations.

This Russian-born author, converted to Catholicism in her adoptive but never quite receptive France, chronicles the ironic paths taken by French families under German occupation in order to survive the debasement that produced too much colloboration for a distant observer’s tastes and the occasional heroic bearing up under a phenomenally humiliating weight.

Nemirovsky, already an accomplished writer when the events that form the matrix of her fiction occured, displays a powerfully sympathetic insight which does not, for all its benign discipline, keep her from calling a hypocritical spade a spade.

One of the deepest ironies of this work is the supreme human sympathy which which she can describe the German officers and soldiers who did the Reich’s duty in occupied France. Men just like those whom she can depict with such humane poignance turned out to be her murderers.

The appendices to these deftly-told tales painfully exposes the nightmare of her arrest and deportation to Poland by means of the correspondence that vainly attempted to secure her release.

Civilization is a supremely thin veneer. Those who boast of their own need badly to cultivate an historical memory.

Suite Francaise is a profoundly moving work of what one wishes were merely fiction.