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Summary
Summary
A New York Review Books Original
Separated from her mother-the famed author of Suite Fran aise -during World War II, Ir ne Nemirovsky's daughter offers a "nuanced, eloquent portrait of a complicated woman" in a series of memoirs that reimagine her mother's life ( The Washington Post )
lisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Ir ne Nemirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian emigre from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn't consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger.
It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote, in The Mirador , her mother's memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made Nemirovsky famous, takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irene herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of "moderation, freedom, and generosity," where at last she is happy.
Some thirteen years later Ir ne picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door. Written a decade before the publication of Suite Fran aise made Ir ne Nemirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), The Mirador is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.
Author Notes
lisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was born in Paris, the daughter of Michel Epstein, a banker, and of the novelist Ir ne Nemirovsky. In 1942, both parents were deported to Auschwitz, where they died, but Gille and her older sister, Denise, lived out the duration of World War II in hiding. Gille worked for many years as an editor and translator, especially of science fiction, and she was over fifty when her first book, The Mirador , appeared and was immediately recognized as a major achievement. Before her death she also published Le Crabe sur la banquette arri re ( The Crab in the Backseat ), a mordantly funny examination of people's responses to her battle with cancer, and a short novel that reflects her and her sister's life in the years after their parents' disappearance, Un paysage de cendres , translated into English as Shadows of a Childhood .
Marina Harss is a translator and dance writer living in New York City. Her recent translations include Mariolina Venezia's Been Here a Thousand Years , Alberto Moravia's Conjugal Love , Pier Paolo Pasolini's Stories from the City of God , and Dino Buzzati's Poem Strip (NYRB Classics).
Rene de Ceccatty is a French novelist, playwright, and critic. His most recent book is a study of Giacomo Leopardi.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gille "rediscovers her lost voice by restoring that of her mother" in this unusual first-person imagined autobiography of Irene Nemirovsky, (Suite Francaise). Nemirovsky witnessed the pogroms of her native Russia and Ukraine, and lived the high life of an emigre in 1920s Paris before being sent to Auschwitz (her children were saved) during WWII. Elegantly written if a bit mechanical (the author was five when her mother was arrested), this new translation of a work published almost 20 years ago in Europe will add to the fascination with Nemirovsky. We are compelled anew as Nemirovsky asks through the facing mirrors of a fictionalized self-portrait once removed, "What could one say of the times I was living in, plagued by revolutions, pogroms, and interminable wars?" It is fascinating to ponder a daughter's occupying her artist-mother as a young woman haunted by the strained relationship with her own mother-a woman self-centered to the point of passing off Irene as her younger sister. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A mirador is a turret, window, or balcony from which one can see for miles the perfect image for Gille's achingly beautiful act of channeling, as she writes from the point of view of her mother, the renowned Russian-born French novelist Irene Nemirovsky, who was killed at Auschwitz when Gille was two. Originally published in France in 1992, the novel was editor and translator Gille's first book (she died in 1996), and it is now available in English for the first time as the Nemirovsky revival continues. Gille's intricately textured and galvanizin. dreamed memorie. constitute a fictionalized memoir of a brilliant, determined, indignant, independent thinker. Irene rebels against her selfish, high-society mother; reads incessantly and writes in secret; absorbs the turmoil of the Russian Revolution; and comes of age exalting in the liberation of emigration. In Paris, she is transformed from a young wife and mother into a literary sensation, then is fatally betrayed. Gille illuminates Irene's psyche with preternatural empathy in this exquisite and moving homage, which is essential for Nemirovsky's growing readership.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Irène Némirovsky's daughter wrestles with her mothers choices. ON Dec. 17, 1941, a year and a half into the Nazi occupation of France, an "Aryan" French governess named Julie Dumot, living in the quiet provincial village of Issy-l'Évêque, received a contract from a Parisian publisher for a novel called "Les Biens de ce Monde" ("All Our Worldly Goods"). That governess worked in the household of a 38-year-old Russian-born Jewish author who saw herself as culturally French but who, under the restrictive laws of the Vichy regime, was no longer permitted to publish under her own name. The book's chapters had already appeared serially in the spring of 1941, without a byline, in the far-right newspaper Gringoire, which blended virulent opinion pages with apolitical literary content. But "Les Biens de ce Monde" appeared in book form only in 1947, five years after the death of its true author, Irène Némirovsky, at Auschwitz. In an undated journal entry in 1942, Némirovsky wrote: "My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it rejects me, let us think about it coldly, let us watch it lose its honor and its life." Her loss of faith in her adoptive country came too late to save her or her husband, Michel Epstein, who died at Auschwitz a few months after his wife. Némirovsky left behind two young daughters - Denise and Élisabeth, who were saved by Julie Dumot - and a very complicated literary legacy. This turbulent personal history can't be detected in "All Our Worldly Goods," a stately, tender and wry novel that upholds the honor of rural France as it follows three generations of a bourgeois Roman Catholic family. "The crash and din of war all fade away. The rest endures," thinks one of the characters, Pierre Hardelot, as he visits his wife on leave from the front in World War I. "But will it endure for me, or for others?" "That should have been the most serious question, the only real question," the novel's omniscient narrator observes. "Yet it wasn't." It wasn't for Pierre Hardelot in 1914, and it wasn't for Irène Némirovsky in 1940. Sandra Smith's pliant English translation conveys Némirovsky's rich, cinematic vision, which embeds observation of the workings of comfortable French country life in a matter-of-fact narration that recalls the detached, unjudgmental style of Joseph Roth or Marguerite Duras. As the book opens, in 1910, the Hardelot family, owners of a paper factory in the village of Saint-Elme, is soon to be riven by a feud. Pierre, the putative heir, is engaged to marry a rich orphan in a match arranged by his profit-minded grandfather. To the old man's fury, Pierre refuses this prudent match, preferring to court a brewer's daughter. Cast out from his family, Pierre decamps to Paris, along with his bride. Soon World War I will arrive, and Pierre will be caught up in the fighting. But the citizens of Saint-Elme prefer not to acknowledge the growing conflict. As the German line advances, the poor flee, but "the rich waited; they would have taken their houses and the very earth they were built on, if they could." Although the village is razed, it will rise again with the help of Grandfather Hardelot - just in time to be destroyed in the next war, when the villagers will flee once more, prefiguring the themes Némirovsky would develop in "Suite Française." She had just finished the first two books of that great, symphonic work when she was deported to Auschwitz. Her elder daughter, Denise, discovered the manuscript half a century later and brought it to publication less than a decade ago. Némirovsky's reputation has been tarnished with charges of anti-Semitism, evidenced by the grotesque caricatures she makes of many of her Jewish characters - charges she understood and regretted too late. It's an ironic predicament for a woman who was killed at Auschwitz, but it doesn't diminish the power of her writing. Reading "Suite Française," "The Ball," "The Courilof Affair" or the superb stories collected in "Dimanche," one recognizes her considerable talent and mourns its premature destruction. And yet even her own younger daughter, Élisabeth Gille, struggled to comprehend Némirovsky's attitudes. Gille told an interviewer that as an adolescent she had considered her mother "criminally blind." "Looking at her work from the 1930s," she explained, "you can see that she couldn't have cared less about the plight of the poor Jews in the working-class neighborhoods." When Gille was in her 50s, still wrestling with the enigma of her mother, she wrote an exquisite fictional autobiography, "Le Mirador," in Némirovsky's imagined first-person voice, bringing to the forefront the Russian background Némirovsky herself had scanted. Published in 1992, four years before Gille died of cancer, the book has now been elegantly translated into English by Marina Harss. (She and I were on the staff of The New Yorker at the same time, long ago.) The early passages of "The Mirador" glow with nostalgic recollections of Némirovsky's privileged childhood and crackle with mother-daughter antipathy. Gille conjures "vast, silent avenues lined with large houses" edged by plane trees and chestnuts, where Irene's family lived and where the little girl staged Napoleonic battles with toy soldiers. Irène rides in a troika through the countryside amid fields of sunflowers and groves of pine and birch trees. Her mother wears furs even in summer, appearing "savagely corseted, her bosom protruding like the bow of a ship." Soon, her mother will disgust Irène with her dalliances with handsome men, who re-emerge in Irene's fiction as "gigolos." In Moscow in October 1917, Irène, safely ensconced in the Hotel Metropol, thrills as she watches street lamps decapitated by gunfire, spurting "streams of burning gas in the dark night." Later the family flees to Finland and Irène receives a birthday kiss on a sleigh. Landing in France in 1919, she makes a solemn vow: "I swore to myself that no matter what happened, I would never again become an exile." SET in Issy-l'Évêque in June 1942, the remainder of the book has a more somber cast, dark with self-recrimination. In it, Gille's version of Irène recounts her wartime travails, ruing the "frivolous young woman" she was in the 1920s and the "rubbish" she wrote then. "Hadn't I read the newspapers?" she asks. Gille punctuates this lyric flow with reminiscences of her own childhood, told in the third person. One of these recalls the day when she returned home from the fields, "drunk with the pleasure of jumping on bales of hay all day long," to find two officers preparing to take her mother away. Gille has said she wrote "The Mirador" in the hope that it would "lead people to reflect" on her mother's posterity. In its pages, she grants Némirovsky a prescient reflection. "If things turn out badly, truly badly," she asks, "what will they think of me?" In "All Our Worldly Goods," Némirovsky gave her characters a hopeful outcome: "We'll rebuild. We'll get through. We'll survive." But history, alas, is a less merciful editor of human fates. When she died at Auschwitz, Némirovsky left behind an extremely complicated literary legacy. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Few of us will forget the experience of discovering Irene Nemirovksy's powerful Suite Francaise and the equally powerful and disturbing details of her life. Now we can rediscover Nemirovksy through this novel, a fictionalized biography written by her daughter and published in 1992, where it helped precipitate a reexamination of this remarkable author's work. Gille was just a few years old when her mother, a Russian emigre much celebrated in France, was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where she died within the month. Through research and, more significantly, imagination, she has re-created her mother's life, from her privileged, samovar-scented youth in St. Petersburg and Kiev (Nemirovksy's horrid mother is particularly well captured), to her flight to France and heady days as an established writer, to the family's increasingly tenuous circumstances as the Germans invaded and occupied France during World War II and friends deserted them. Gille writes in a style at once lyric and focused, periodically introducing her alter ego's dispassionate reflections as an adult. VERDICT As Gille concludes, Nemirovksy "will remain thirty-nine for all eternity," and that painful realization resonates throughout this beautiful book. For all readers of literary fiction.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.