"Suite Française" by Irene Némirovsky
Excellent beginning (340 pages) of a planned 1,000 page novel. She had planned it as a 5 movement Beethoven symphony and finished the first two before she was deported to Auschwitz where she died in 1942. Némirovsky was a Russian Jewish emigre living in France and a novelist. Her husband was also eventually deported leaving behind two young daughters who were hidden and protected by friends.
This fragment of a novel was written in very small writing to save paper and ink and her daughters felt it was a memoir and couldn't bring themselves to read it. Sixty-five years later, her daughter Denise discovered the notebooks contained not a diary but this novel. It is set during Paris' fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and follows a group of Parisians as they flee the city and end up in villages that are occupied by the Germans.
I enjoyed the novel very much. She provides wonderful portraits of a wide variety of people in stressed circumstances. As well, the edition includes the copious notes she wrote planning the novel and what was to happen to the characters. Of course she didn't know the outcome of the war at the time or what was to happen to her. There are also letters from and to her husband to various friends and officials trying for her release and also trying to send her things. Very poignant reading.
