Irene Nemirovsky's war narrative, Suite francaise, was discovered
and published posthumously in 2004, over sixty years after it was
written. A Jewish Russian immigrant who had achieved literary
stardom during the twenty years she lived in France, Nemirovsky
wrote her novel during the first years of the Occupation, before
she was deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942.
When published, the book produced an immediate international
sensation and has since been translated into more than twenty-five
languages. While giving rise to a certain amount of controversy,
the novel has been widely acclaimed as a literary masterpiece
providing a devastating portrayal of France's defeat and
occupation. In this work, the first critical monograph on Suite
francaise, Nathan Bracher shows how, first amid the chaos and panic
of the May-June 1940 debacle, and then within the unsettling new
order of the German occupation, Nemirovsky's novel casts a
particularly revealing light on the behavior and attitudes of the
French as well as on the highly problematic interaction of France's
social classes. It offers valuable insights on a number of subjects
(in particular, the civilian exodus, the relations of French women
with German soldiers, and socio-economic conflicts under the
Occupation) that, until now, have been too often neglected or
misunderstood, while at the same time displaying a striking
originality when compared to other discourses and narratives dating
from the same period. Bracher dispels a number of misconceptions
that have arisen when Suite francaise has been assessed on the
basis of biographical presumptions or with respect to current
imperatives of the "duty to remember." Instead of viewing Suite
francaise as a source of information about the author or as a
simple instrument of memory, we can best understand the novel,
Bracher argues, as a specifically configured literary text whose
voice can engage its readers in a critical dialogue with the
dramatic era of the catastrophic fall of France and the ensuing
Occupation. Contrary to certain polemical interpretations, Bracher
shows that Nemirovsky's searing novel not only makes a mockery of
Vichy ideology but even adumbrates an ethic of resistance. ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Nathan Bracher is professor of French at Texas A&M
University and author of Through the Past Darkly: History and
Memory in Francois Mauriac's Bloc-notes. FROM THE BOOK: "It is well
known that human beings are complex, multi-faceted, contradictory,
and full of surprises, but it takes a time of war or great upheaval
in order to see it. That is the most fascinating and the most
terrible spectacle, she thought. The most terrible because it it
the most real: you cannot take it for granted that you know the sea
without having seen it during a storm as well as during calm
weather. The person who knows men and women is somebody who has
observed them during an era such as this one, she thought. Only
such people know themselves." -- From Irene Nemirovsky, Suite
francaise PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "A timely exploration of
Nemirovsky's literary contribution in Suite francaise. Nathan
Bracher shows how Nemirovsky's fictional narrative intersects with
existing historical research and makes insightful comparisons with
the texts of other contemporary writers. Bracher convincingly takes
on Nemirovsky's critics as well as providing an engaging discussion
of her narrative techniques and influences. The book will be of
interest to all Nemirovsky scholars." --Hanna Diamond, Reader in
French History, University of Bath "After the Fall returns us to
the panic and anxieties of 1940 and the months that followed when
it was not apparent that Germany would lose the war or that the
harsh conditions of life would soon end. Bracher is sensitive to
gender showing how as a woman Nemirovsky u
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