power of contemporaneity
Reader comment on: L'Affaire Némirovsky

Submitted by keith elliott, Jan 13, 2008 07:25

The book has been likened to Ann' Frank's Diary. Understandable. As Benitas thorough article suggests, Iréné Némirovsky should be of huge psychological interest to us all, whatever our time, space and origin. La Suite Française, both movements of her symphony to Occupied France, hardly bears the word jew, unlike other earlier works where she obviously is trying to take to task her ambivolent attitude to the world she comes from. It's a work of instamatic vignettes, painted with a calligraphers precision to detail in perfect harmony with gesture reflection and timing. In her Burgundy oasis, walking through the woods, living a family life pardoxically more homely than before June1940, she seems to be letting out in small measured breaths, the absolute irony, agony and absurdity of intollerance, including her own, and waking up gradually to the fact of the horror of intollerance on epic scale. She is sounding out French motives from the petit bourgois to the upper echelons; to the small minded, be they urban or rural, as well as human motives, including her own, about why and how hate should lead to instantaneous rejection, when appearances and loyalties seemes hardly to suggest pique. Perhaps Irène was still sorting out her inner battle with her mother's rejection. when she wrote just about anything. In La Suite, she is setting in against a fresco of fascist forays, not only into one's motherland, but equally into one's own self.

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