L'Affaire Némirovsky.

By BENITA EISLER
June 27, 2007


Albert Harlingue / Roger-Viollet
The novelist's life, more than her early work, prepares us for her masterpiece, Benita Eisler writes. Above, Irène Némirovsky reads the arts section of a Parisian newspaper on the eve of World War II.

By the time it appeared in Paris bookstores in 2004, "Suite Française," an unfinished novel by an unknown author who had been dead for 62 years, announced a publishing phenomenon. Translated into 30 languages, the hardcover edition sold close to 1 million copies worldwide, remaining on the New York Times best seller list for 102 weeks. Word of mouth played a crucial part in Irène Némirovsky's extraordinary posthumous success. Before the book was reviewed here, everyone, it seems, had a friend who insisted — in the urgent tone of a moral obligation: "You must read this."

Planned as a work in five volumes, Némirovsky only completed two, but the circumstances of the interrupted work — the author's arrest, deportation, and death from typhus in Auschwitz in July 1942, followed by the miraculous recovery of the tiny notebook containing the manuscript, unread and forgotten in a suitcase for over half a century — this cycle of suffering, disappearance, and resurrection conferred upon the book the nimbus of a sacred text.

Who was this woman, author of 13 earlier novels, her name erased for so long from literary history? The face that stares from the close-up, filling the front jacket of the French edition, is a portrait in contradiction. The classically Semitic features, somber expression, dark, close-set eyes that seem to see the horrors to come, play oddly against the glamour of the 1930s Hollywood-style "glossy" the back-lit head and fashionable coiffure, neck framed in fur. In a brilliant stroke of marketing, the English-language publishers created an alternative script: Némirovsky's haunted gaze has been replaced by another period photograph; the couple on the verge of parting (suitcase in the foreground) are drenched in the colorized nostalgia of a 1940s movie still. We've seen that blond Bergman-esque young woman and her dark stocky lover before. Their destination isn't Auschwitz, it's Casablanca!

Rescued from oblivion , the author and her work were soon at risk of burial by hype and hagiography. Némirovsky's talent, if not genius, was compared to Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Proust, and Chekhov, whose biography was her only nonfiction work. Following the sensation of "Suite Française," Némirovsky's previous novels, most to be translated for the first time, have now been scheduled for re-issue: " David Golder" will be published in America later this year; "Chaleur du Sang" (Fire in the Blood) and " Les Chiens et les Loups" (Dogs and Wolves) will follow in the near future. All three are key to understanding the evolution of the writer. Letters, notebooks, and sections of journals have been released by her daughter, who also provided interviews to selected journalists and writers. Jonathan Weiss's study of Némirovsky ( Stanford University Press, 224 pages, $24.95) was published here in 2006, and another biography will appear in France this fall. Newly recovered evidence has placed the author within the context of her times — the shameful France of the 1930s — leading to fresh scrutiny of her life and work. Both have been exposed as rife with dubious political and moral choices.

More:
http://www.nysun.com/article/57373