The Némirovsky Myth

Certainly TNR is right that Simon & Schuster mightily scrubbed the author’s bio when Suite Francaise was published, but someone should point out to them that they’re not the first ones to notice. ("Scandale Francaise – The Nasty Truth about a New Literary Heroine" is a bit much for a title.) The Literary Saloon was reporting on this story continuously during SF’s release and The Nation thoroughly covered this in their review.

In addition, TNR’s accusation of fraud sounds rather overheated:

If any reader still managed to pick up Suite Francaise without knowing that the book’s author died at Auschwitz, he or she would have learned it in the second sentence of the jacket copy. And the novel’s handsome editorial apparatus includes Némirovsky’s notes "on the situation in France" and a selection of correspondence, including her husband’s desperate letters to friends on her behalf after her arrest. The implication is clear: Suite Francaise, aside from its literary value, is to be regarded as an authentic, even numinous document miraculously salvaged from the ashes of the great catastrophe, as poignant and as prophetic as the diary of Anne Frank, to which it has been frequently, and nonsensically, compared. In the words of one reporter, the novel is "a classic Holocaust story by an author who would not live to see her work published."

The truth is, this was spin. Worse, it was a fraud. The fraud could be perpetrated because very few readers in our day know anything about Irène Némirovsky.

Yeah, blame S&S for blowing this story up, but blame book reviewers for eating it up.

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