MORE ABOUT THE NAZIS

Well, it must be the current administation but I can't help but thinking of the Nazis. Never a favorite subject but we all know he who doesn't remember the past is doomed to...etc. etc...My reading group (I'm one of 20 million people in the states who are part of one) recently tackled the formidable Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. It's in many ways an impressive book, but more remarkable for having been discovered by her daughters relatively recently who submitted it to Knopf for publication. Nemirovsky's life is complex and tragic in equal measure. The daughter of extremely wealthy international bankers she married well and lived in Paris, hated being Jewish and converted to catholicism, and by her late 20s was regarded as one of the most accomplished novelists of her decade. Her fame for whatever reasons didn't extend much to the United States but she won the prestigious Prix de Medici at least once... She also emerges as colossally narcissistic, extremely self-involved and Suite Francaise which is written during the Nazi occupation of France is much less concerned with the war than it is with the intense internal frustrations of everyone in it to connect with each other without ever finding satisfaction. At the climax, a priest is brutally murdered by a group of underprivileged school children. She has great verve and style but a tremendous social snobbery that makes Virginia Woolf look like a Marxist permeates the work. In real life, Nemirovsky was convinced that her money, literary fame, and conversion to Christianity would save her from peril, but sadly at 39 despite numerous opportunities to escape the occupation, she and her husband perished in Auschwitz. Suite Francaise is complete with an appendix which is a fascianting glimpse into this complex and brilliant woman who created a near-masterpiece but didn't live to tell the tale. The appendix has the eerie sense of a ghost speaking after the fact when it might have known better!