Good nights and days, Irene

Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise is accompanying me on my daily jaunts to Hartford--as new as the translation is, there is already a recorded version on CD. No single work of fiction has impressed me as thoroughly and as deeply since I first read War and Peace. Have I read her equal, and Tolstoy's equal, in these intervening years? of course--but Nemirovsky is for me, as for most of the world, a discovery, and encountering her has the delight of the unexpected. The first novel of two that she completed in what was to have been a five-novel sequence depicts the flight of several people, singles, couples, and families, from Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Nemirovsky's deft management of the shifts in the narrative from the collective to the particular, her quick, mercurial, razor-sure creations of and delineations of character are not less than dazzling.
And this is another of the Nazi murders: she died in the camps in 1942. Russian-Jewish by extraction, she thought and felt and wrote as a French woman. This is the very essence of the crude, stupid, reductive racism of the Nazis: Nemirovsky's uniqueness is dismissed for an accident of birth that did not define her. How many more Nemirovskys did the Nazis murder? the Stalinist purges? It's all very well, with Gray, to mope for "mute inglorious Miltons"--but his poor shepherd-boys and thwarted lights died in their beds.