Elegy for the land of the vanquished

I still remember perfectly, twenty years ago, the impression that reading made on me French suiteby Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). As always, I took it. This ironic, intelligent, meticulous, multilingual, and highly cultured woman did not deserve to die (if anyone did). deserves (to die), but she was murdered on August 17, 1942, in Birkenau. Three months later, her husband, Michel Epstein, would vanish from the same chimneys. They were Jewish. They had been born in Russia, fled the Bolsheviks, settled in France, and converted to Catholicism. But for the Nazis, they were simply "Jews."

We are still in 1942. A thirteen-year-old daughter, Denise, keeps one of her mother's suitcases. Inside are photos, family documents, and a final manuscript by the writer, written in tiny handwriting to save paper. She was a well-known author in France: her most famous book, David Golder (1929), and a film was even made about it. The Proa publishing house also translated it into Catalan in the 1930s. But this manuscript from the suitcase, these miraculously saved papers that are circulating around France following the hiding place of Denise and her sister Élisabet, are destined for a different kind of glory, a different kind of legend.

French suite It is a monumental work, a grand fresco of a thousand pages, in the Tolstoyan style, that explains the tragedy of France, the land of the vanquished, the land of the mediocre. But what Irène Némirovsky doesn't know is that her unfinished work (with only two parts of the four or five planned) will be published sixty-two years after her death, thanks to the foresight of Denise Epstein.

After that, I continued reading Némirovsky as her work was being translated into Catalan. The danceFor example, his genius shines through once again. We also find his mastery of language and a delightful cast of unforgettable characters: the hysterical and ill-mannered Rosine Kampf, the mother; the distant and unkempt father, still unable to digest the stock market windfall that lifted him out of poverty; and this neglected daughter, treated like a child, who harbors in her adolescent breast a dazzling and malevolent revenge for not having been invited to her parents' ball.

Yeah French suite He was a Tolstoyan, The dance It's a Balzacian delight. But now, with The autumn bonfiresIn what Josep Maria Pinto has just magnificently translated for Vienna, the legacies of Tolstoy and Balzac come together once again to create a masterpiece. Nothing less. The autumn bonfiresThe critical and accurate view of French society takes another step forward. If the First World War bitterly ended the Belle Époque, what would occur in the interwar period was a rampant process of social decay in France, exemplified by the pathetic odyssey of Bernard Jacquelain.

Bernard is a hero of the First World War. He went there with the blind zeal of youth, hoping it would last longer than the three or four weeks predicted for Paris so he could show off his skills. It lasted four years. When he returns from the trenches, Jacquelain is a morally broken man, who no longer believes in anything. He will turn to shady dealings, marry a widowed childhood friend, but will not relinquish his mistress. Before he knows it, the voracious and amoral individualism of his generation has led France to defeat at the hands of the old German enemy. At Versailles, the ignominy changes sides.

Her marriage has also fallen apart. "Happy marriages," writes Némirovsky, "are those in which the spouses know everything about each other, or those in which they know nothing. Ordinary marriages are based on a partial trust."

Bernard and his wife Thérèse's half-hearted trust has brought them to the brink of disaster, but there is one final note that aims to be positive. The war is over. Now begins the bitterness of defeat.