Suite Francaise

Starred review from June 5, 2006
HighBridge has chosen exceptional readers for these remarkable novellas. Oreskes reads "Storm in June" in a clear, low storyteller's voice, changing tone to designate characters without trying to act out or be those characters. He handles Nemirovsky's black humor and irony with intelligence, and understates to great effect reactions from haughtiness to decency in the midst of panic and death as masses suddenly rush from Paris in the wake of Nazi bombings in 1940. Rosenblat has a husky Lauren Bacall voice that draws you into the dialectically complex relationship between French villagers and German occupiers in "Dolce." This is not a diary or a novel written years later in cool contemplation. These are historical novellas written while the author lived through the events. Yet with the detachment of hindsight and the craft of a fine, experienced author (she had successfully published nine novels), Nemirovsky shapes into novel form the stories of a small gallery of French Parisians and villagers and occupying German officers and soldiers, each with his or her national and personal idiosyncrasies and destinies. This was to have been the first of five novellas in an ongoing war saga, but in 1942 the Germans discovered the Jewish writer living in a small village. She was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, and died a month later. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 13).

These recently rediscovered opening sections of a planned five-part novel by Irene Nemirovsky, who died in Auschwitz in 1942, are cause for rejoicing and for deep mourning for what was lost. Daniel Oreskes reads the first novella, a bleak human comedy of Parisians fleeing the city in chaos, rather pointlessly, it turns out, as the Wehrmacht arrives. Barbara Rosenblat performs the second, in which many characters from the first reappear, about the sometimes subtle, sometimes violent tensions in a French farm village under German occupation, as conquerors and conquered, aristocrats and peasants interact in unaccustomed ways. This is complex, polished, and moving work by Nemirovsky, who must have written at breakneck speed, and by two incomparable actors, a virtually flawless production that will repay multiple listenings. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine