HT reviewer Saudamini Jain picks her best reads of 2020

Fiction as reportage in a novel written and set during the Nazi occupation of France

In March this year when migrant workers were walking hundreds of kilometres back home, I found myself reading Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, a novel set and written during the Nazi occupation of France. As the German army advanced, nearly two million people left Paris for the safety of the countryside.

They looked around and expected some miracle: a car, a truck, anything that would take them. But nothing came. So they headed out of Paris on foot, past the city gates, dragging their bags behind them in the dust, then on into the suburbs, into the countryside, all the while thinking, “This can’t be happening! I must be dreaming!”

While I was reading Suite Française, the Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li was running #TolstoyTogether, a virtual book club for readers around the world to read and discuss War and Peace, which according to Li “contains everything about life.” Tolstoy had chronicled the history of his grandparents’ generation. His novel, set during the Napoleonic wars, is told through five aristocratic families and hundreds of minor characters.

Reviewer Saudamini Jain

Némirovsky, a famous Parisian novelist, was trying to do something similar in the French countryside. Like War and Peace, which her book was being modelled on, she was writing a history of the world. Tolstoy had chronicled the history of his grandparents’ generation. Suite Française is fiction as reportage. Némirovsky was documenting her times through a large cast of characters — farmers, aristocrats, artists and everyone in between — “people linked together solely by the times they’re living in.”

In the first section, Parisians flee. In times of crises, people reveal themselves. Némirovsky captures them at their worst and their most honourable, presenting an enduring study of human behaviour. The second section (adapted into a film in 2015) is about a quiet romance between a young French woman and a German soldier.

Not a word of their true feelings was spoken; they didn’t kiss. There was simply silence. Silence followed by feverish, passionate conversations about their own countries, their families, music, books… they felt a strange happiness, an urgent need to reveal their hearts to each other.

Némirovsky had hoped to lay out her book, like War and Peace, in five sections. In her notes she told herself to “try to create as much as possible: things, debates…that will interest people in 1952 or 2052.” But she was able to finish only two. Later in 1942, she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died.

Suite Française is known more for the story of its glamorous writer, her tragic demise and especially because it remained hidden in a notebook as her daughters had found it too painful to look at their mother’s handwriting for decades. It was published only in 2004.

The published book consists of the two sections which read like interconnected novellas. These are followed by a transcription of Némirovsky’s handwritten notes for the remainder of the book and correspondence from 1936 to 1945, which documents the rise of anti-Semitism and horrors of the holocaust.

In this year of uncertainty, Suite Française tethered me to reality. I saw parallels unfolding around me, and in its incompleteness, I found not solace but perhaps the more important thing: forbearance.

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.