Suite Francaise (1940-2004) - Irene Nemirovsky Audiobook

Written by Irene Nemirovsky
Read by Daniel Oreskes Barbara Rosenblat
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: July 16, 2013
Duration: 13:13:43

Biography of the author—
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Her husband Michael spent a few desperate months not knowing the fate of his wife, trying every avenue he could to discover her whereabouts, even offering to take her place before, in October, he too was arrested, transported to Auschwitz and sent immediately to the gas chambers.

Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom.

Miraculously both their daughters not only survived the war but managed to hold on to their mother’s writing while doing so. In one of the most disturbing episodes of this history, the daughters return to Paris to seek out their grandmother, who turns them away telling them that if their parents are dead they should find an orphanage!

The decades pass with neither daughter having the strength to read their dead mother’s writing which they presume to be journal entries and not a manuscript for a novel. The notebook, containing the first two parts of the planned novel, were not examined until 1998 and were only published in French in 2004 where they became a critically-acclaimed bestseller.

Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece

The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.

“Oreskes reads “Storm in June” in a clear, low storyteller’s voice, changing tone to designate characters without trying to act out or be those characters. He handles Nemirovsky’s black humor and irony with intelligence, and understates to great effect reactions from haughtiness to decency in the midst of panic and death as masses suddenly rush from Paris in the wake of Nazi bombings in 1940. Rosenblat has a husky Lauren Bacall voice that draws you into the dialectically complex relationship between French villagers and German occupiers in “Dolce.”

“…. This is complex, polished, and moving work by Nemirovsky, who must have written at breakneck speed, and by two incomparable actors, a virtually flawless production that will repay multiple listenings.”—. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award