So my recent obsession has been the novelist, Irene Nemirovsky, author of Suite Francaise, The Dogs and the Wolves, Fire in the Blood, David Golder and Le Bal.
Her powerful and poignant works, have an even a stronger resonance, considering her own story as a tragic victim of the Nazi Regime in the Second World War. Nemirovsky’s work try to convey the momentous events and upheaval of ordinary Parisians and rural communities. They beautifully portray relationships and love, documenting the vivid characters struggle to come to terms with the situation in wartime France and to continue with their domestic normality despite the fear and doubt. However, her novels offer an insight into the character’s hope, that true love and happiness can evolve even in a country ridden with war. It is the psychology of these character’s relationships with each other that really stick out, Germans mixing with the French, officers and civilians, but in the end, they are all going through the same thing, just trying to get on day to day.
In 1941, Nemirovsky started to write Suite Francaise, seeing it as a volume of three or four works, however, only two were completed. She died in Auschwitz in 1942, having never finished her great masterpiece. The novel was saved by her daughters and published sixty-five years later.
Find her work on Goodreads or Amazon here.
