[lbo-talk] What are you reading now?

Robert Wrubel bobwrubel at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 14 19:30:27 PDT 2007


Thanks for the reminder, Jordan. I bought Nemirovsky too, awhile ago, but got distracted with an arcane work called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. I bought Nemirovsky for the same reason you did -- to learn about ordinary peoples' experience with encroaching fascism. I had tried Sartre's trilogy on the theme a few years ago, but couldnt identify with the intellectual types he seemed to write about.

BobW

--- Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com> wrote:


> I just finished Suite Francaise, a novel by Irene
> Nemirovsky.
>
> At the beginning, we find this:
>
> Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a
> welathy banking
> family and emmigrated to France during the Russian
> Revolution.
> After attending the Sorbonne, she began to write
> and swiftly
> achieved success with an early novel, <i>David
> Golder</i>, which
> was followed by <i>The Ball</i>, <i>Snow in
> Autumn</i>, <i>Dogs
> and Wolves</i>, and <i>The Courilof Affair</i>,
> among others.
> She died in 1942 at Auschwitz.
>
> It's a wonderful set of vignettes about people whose
> circumstances are
> upset by the invasion of France by the Nazis in
> 1940. There's a bunch
> of correspondence at the end between her and her
> publisher, growing
> ever weary about the laws being passed against Jews
> and eventually a
> few messages from her distraught husband as he tries
> to find her after
> her arrest. Usually you don't find such a strong
> connection between
> the characters in a book and a personal (and tragic)
> story of the
> author. I've been reading a lot of early WWII stuff
> these days, and
> this fits in nicely. Apparently this book was
> "lost" for many years
> until someone translated it in 2006.
>
> /jordan
>
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