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The Life of Irene Nemirovsky

Author of Suite Francaise

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A major biography of Irène Némirovksy, author of the acclaimed and internationally bestselling Suite Française — with new material never published in English.
Irène Némirovksy's own life was as dramatic as any fiction. And few writers enjoy a posthumous resurgence as astonishing as hers after the international triumph of Suite Française. The authors of this fascinating biography have had access to previously unpublished documents and to surviving family members in Russia, researching there her childhood in the Ukraine, and tracing her odyssey first to St Petersburg, where her father was a successful financier, and then, as the family was forced to flee the Russian Revolution, to Finland, Sweden and finally France in 1919.
Meticulously researched and passionately felt, this is a remarkable, panoramic biography of an exceptional writer, a moving portrait of a woman and of her extraordinary times, and a sweeping saga of a turbulent period of European history, holding up a mirror to the world of publishing, intellectual thought, society and the darker shadow of prejudice between the wars.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 29, 2010
      French biographers Philipponnat and Lienhardt draw on heretofore unexamined archives to present the turbulent, tragic life of Irène Némirovsky, author of the posthumous bestseller Suite Française.
      Némirovsky (1903–1942) lived through two great persecutions of the 20th century: the pogroms of her native Kiev and Odessa and, having fled Russia for France after the Russian revolution, the Holocaust. As WWII raged, with the Germans' relentless oppression of so-called “stateless people,” her conversion to Catholicismdid not save her. Némirovsky was taken to a concentration camp in the Loiret, then shipped to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died with Suite Française
      uncompleted. This book elegantly balances her life and the work, painting a portrait (if at some distance) of a spirited young asthmatic writer, daughter, wife, and mother. Descended from cultural rather than religiously observant Jews, Némirovsky's artistic sensibility survived an early monotonous environment formed by her commercial-banker father and the scorn of her vain, spiteful mother. The authors nicely cover the French publishing industry during the high-flying days of success when Némirovsky's bestselling and controversial 1929 novel, David Golder
      , was published as well as the upper-crust émigré Parisian lifestyle of the Jazz Age. 43 photos.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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