by Jessica Schneider

Created on: June 25, 2009   Last Updated: March 11, 2010

It is difficult to review a work that one not only knows is unfinished, but also one that reads that way. Such has never been a stronger case than with Irene Nemirovsky's 'novel' Suite Franaise. The book has been marketed as a novel when really it is two unfinished novellas, and according to the appendix in the back of the book, Nemirovsky was intending to make the final book contain five parts but unfortunately she was sent to die in the Auschwitz death camp in 1942 before she was able to finish it.

Her daughter, Denise Epstein, then kept the manuscript for 64 years, not really reading it and assuming the notebook was only scribblings of everyday observations. When she finally opened it, however, she found it was something of a narrative structure, albeit one that was in desperate need of revision and never got it.

Because Suite Franaise is an unfinished work, I can only judge it as how it appears to me, as is. Overall, I can't really tell from this book if Nemirovsky herself was a great writer or not, because as is, this book is not good. The narrative is all over the place, the characters are never really developed, and nor do we really care about them. In fact, when reading the reviews about this book, there is more said about Nemirovsky's life than the actual work.

I have a hard time believing, for example, that if this were written by someone alive today and not by someone who died at Auschwitz, that readers would be so praising. Most moments and scenes do not stick in the mind, (with few exceptions) and for the most part, what readers are presented with is nothing more than just description of the Germans invading Paris, people packing up and leaving, hiding from the falling bombs, etc. The only difference between this book and any other book set in wartime (setting aside that this is unfinished) is that the book was written while the events were taking place.

So what? When one critiques anything, ultimately what remains is that which is on the page. There are so many characters in these two novellas, for example, that you don't remember a single one with any depth because none are really fleshed out. Just to give a bit of contrast, Terrence Malik's great film The Thin Red Line applied voiceover to many different characters in his film, but because the film is driven by the universal ideas of war, loneliness, separation, and isolation, the fact that the viewers do not know which character is speaking doesn't really matter because the characters are more

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