Suite Française - Prix Renaudot 2004, IRENE NEMIROVSKY

Written in the heat of history, Suite française almost directly depicts the Exodus of June 1940, which tragically mixed French families of all kinds, from the wealthiest to the most modest. With great skill, Irène Némirovsky tracks the countless small acts of cowardice and fragile moments of solidarity of a population in disarray. Kept women abandoned by their lovers, wealthy bourgeois disgusted by the populace, wounded soldiers abandoned in farms – all clog the roads of France, randomly bombed... Slowly, the enemy takes possession of an inert and frightened country. Like so many others, the village of Bussy is then forced to host German troops. Exacerbated by the presence of the occupier, the social tensions and frustrations of the inhabitants reawaken... A moving, intimate, implacable novel, revealing with extraordinary lucidity the soul of every Frenchman during the Occupation (enriched with notes and Irène Némirovsky's correspondence), Suite française resurrects with a brilliant and intuitive pen a raw piece of our memory.