Four Novels - Readings

Description

Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, yet hugely talented novelist, who fled Russia for Paris after the Revolution and died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky s other novels - all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time.

David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky s reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman,an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescenceand a mercilessexposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian emigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassinationcommitted in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud.

About the Author

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. The daughter of a Jewish Ukranian banker and raised with a love of French culture, she was sixteen when she and her family settled in Paris. Ten years later, her novel “David Golder” thrust her to the forefront of the French literary scene. The dozen books and short stories she wrote over the following decade earned her admiration and caused controversy too, with their violent lucidity and cruel descriptions of a world destined to disappear.

The Occupation and the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic laws put an end to her brilliant career. Irène was forbidden from publishing and reduced to selling her writing under a pseudonym to the newspapers that would still print her. She retreated to the Burgundy village of Issy-l’Evêque with her husband, Michael Epstein, and their two daughters, Denise and Élisabeth. To help fill the void created by exile, Irene began an extraordinary project. She would tell the story of the war as it was unfolding in five volumes taken straight from current events.

Two novels were born, written in her cramped handwriting in a leatherbound notebook, “Storm in June” (Tepête en juin) and “Dolce,” under the series title “Suite française.” That headlong creative period was halted when she was arrested by French police on July 13, 1942. She was sent to Auschwitz and died there, from typhus it is believed, a month

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