Vive la France

'Suite Francaise' - Irene Nemirovsky

France has fallen and the Wehrmacht will soon enter the City of Light - So begins Nemirovsky's wartime novel. The stage thus set, she assembles a cast- patrician, bourgeois, plebeian - whose members adapt (or not) to both occupation and occupier.

Originally intended as a novel in five parts, Nemirovsky completed only two parts prior to her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz where she died in 1942. Art does indeed imitate life.