Bad historian (yet again) I had never read anything by Irène Némirovsky
until my mother decided to invest a cheeky pound at Oxfam and buy me a copy of
this novel.
Which, in my view, is actually two novels of extremely uneven quality.
On the one hand, Tempête en Juin is
an unusual portrayal of a defeated nation and its weaknesses, but on the other
hand Dolce is a fairly boring and
uneventful description of life in the countryside in occupied France with
romantic overtones (seriously, ask Fenoglio how to write a novel about Nazi
occupation and its impact on the countryside).
Of all the parallel plots that interlink in Tempête en Juin, the story of Philippe Péricands and “his” kids is
breathtakingly beautiful in a way that only French stories about children of
the 40s and 50s can be (Les Choristes, Au
revoir les enfants), and is a reminder
of how unstable the lives of troubled youth at the time could be, very much
like in Les Quatre Cents Coups.
The one thing I struggle to understand
though, is how Némirovsky managed to have an early draft of the two pieces of
the Suite that was already so polished – had I been fighting against
time like she was, I think I would have desperately tried to finish a very messy
first draft of the whole book before allowing myself to re-read it even once.
But then again, I’m not a great writer…
