Unfinished novels are always hard to judge. One may see the potential, but it’s hard to imagine where the story would have ended. That’s even more true in this case, where we have 400 out of over 1000 projected pages, and according to the author’s notes possibly even more. 

Suite Francaise was imagined like a War and Peace, an epic describing various strata of society at the time of a great war, in this case the greatest of them all, WWII. It’s so striking that a fugitive Nemirovsky saw this opportunity to write the story of her day to day, so clearly understanding the dynamics of the German occupation of France, and dedicated her time to writing this huge manuscript with all the cheap ink and scrap paper she had left. In that sense, it’s as ambitious as it is tragic. Her characters encompass the different societal attitudes to the struggle, the reversal to feral instincts, the humanity in a German soldier falling in love with his host and captive- a French woman living with her mother in law while her husband is held prisoner on the battle front-, the idealistic resistance led by young communists. 

All the while, she was captured and killed due to her jewish and Russian heritage, no matter how critical she’d been of it, and so was her husband, after he strongly advocated for her release, and her daughters made an unlikely escape after being hunted down by the nazis, always carrying the manuscript with them in a sealed briefcase. Maybe what I want to say is that the annex to this novel was more interesting than the novel itself. But it also pains me to say that because it’s not the author’s fault. She had big ideas, they just didn’t come to fruition.

I also think the translation I read let me down a bit, it was a bit choppy. I am very sorry to give it a low rating, partially due to that, but alas.