Softcover, 715 pages
English language
Published Aug. 7, 2007 by Large Print Press.
By the early 1940s, Ukranian-born Irene Nemirovsky was already a successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier she'd begun a five-part epic of the human drama in which she herself would become a victim. Her daughters took the two completed parts with them into hiding. At long last, we can read Nemirovsky's masterpiece: a singularly piercing evocation of life and death in occupied France. (back cover)
I thought the first novella, about the exodus from Paris during the invasion of the German army in 1940, the more interesting of the two. Overall, a good read, but I wanted to like it more.
Unfinished and unedited but there are moments where Nemirovsky's ability to describe humans - the pettiness, the narcissism, the justifications, the ability to go on like nothing is happening - and the way there can be so much normalcy in the middle of apocalypse. Reading it after experiencing humanity the last couple of years really answers that question, "but how?".
If only she got to finish all five of the chapters she wanted to finish.
I haven't read any of her other books, but [author: Irene Nemirovsky] was a writer of extraordinary talent. Her characters, Her attention to detail and her ability to inhabit a future that she would never know are the reasons that this book is a great work of literature, despite the fact that she was never able to finish the book.
