''Suite Francaise'', Irene Nemirovsky

I have to confess that a snobbish bit of me doesn't want to be moved by books which are sold by appealing to that emotion. I'm also not generally a fan of ''war'' books; despite the fact I studied history at university, I tend to find fictional accounts either too melodramatic or dry (yes, I know, I'm a fusspot). So I'm quite glad that I didn't know the ''back story'' of this book before I bought it, as it would definitely have put me off. ''Suite Francaise'', darling of newspaper reviewers, and seemingly perpeptually on the ''top sellers'' shelf at Borders, is set in Occupied France during WWII, and was written by Nemirovsky, a Russian Jew living in France during that period.



What's phenomenal is that Nemirovsky wrote this fictional work contemporaneously with the events unfolding around her. It's hard to get your head around the fact that this ''Suite'' is only two of her planned five-part series of novellas - she finished the ones based in 1940 - 1942 (''Storm in June'', ''Dolce''), but didn't manage to complete the hypothetical storylines of the post 1942 parts (''Captivity'', ''Battles'', ''Peace'') because she died in Auschwitz in 1942. The manuscripts were kept by her daughters who were smuggled around France and evaded the camps; only when one daughter decided to donate what she assumed were her mother's diaries to a literature institute did she discover that they were an unfinished novel, and they were eventually published in 2004.



Background aside (and I didn't know most of it whilst I was reading; the appendices fill you in later), ''Suite Francaise'' is the story of various people caught up in the Nazi occupation of France - firstly, in the exodus of Paris during the invasion, and secondly in a village where German soldiers lived among the French. In history lessons, the experience of civilians during war tends to be dealt with very briefly, and in between Physics and Double PE I can't say I ever really imagined the war on a human level. Nemirovsky's gift is in bringing the events of the time to a human level whilst retaining the grand perspective - the immediacy of her experience is clear throughout. The account of how life can be turned entirely upside down in days was chilling and felt somehow timeless; as did the behaviour of people being occupied by a foreign force who are, after all, just people like them. Unfortunately I find it very hard to write about things like this without feeling self-conscious at my own mawkish sentimentality, but for once I have to agree that this was a tremendously moving book. Forcing a few Sixth-years to read it along with the Penguin History of the Twentieth Century would probably make for a few more enlightened teenagers and a deeper appreciation of something which really wasn't all that long ago, and somehow feels all too possible to happen again.