Author Irène Némirovsky penned the following lines in her journal: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” She wrote this a year into the German occupation of France during World War II as she contemplated the potential fate that awaited her because of her heritage: she was a Jew.  

Némirovsky, whose family had already experienced persecution because of the pogroms in the late nineteenth century, fled Russia with her parents during the Bolshevik Revolution and immigrated to France in 1919. A reader and writer as a girl, she was a young artist in the making, honing the skills that would eventually lead her to write a best-selling novel at the age of twenty-six. France became her home, and she married, had two children, and continued to write during the 1930s. Those works earned her respect and fame as a well-known author. But Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 created ripples for Nemirovsky as anti-Jewish propaganda and sentiment washed into France. Despite her family’s conversion to Catholicism and a bid for French citizenship (that was never completed), Némirovsky could see the writing on the wall and seemed to know that Germany’s invasion of France in 1940 would make her family’s life very difficult.

In the midst of the rising tension in the country and the uncertainty for her family’s welfare, Némirovsky began writing what would become Suite Française, a five-part novel based on the movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Plans for the novel indicate that it would detail life in France from June 1940 when the Germans moved in to the country up to the end of the war. Tragically, Némirovsky would never finish the novel. She would only write the first two sections or novellas before being arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz in 1942. She would die there within a month of her arrival.

We cannot forget the first part of that phrase from her journal: “What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me. . . .” For it is in this sentiment that part of the unfinished novel’s power resides. She wrote clearly about life during the occupation, while going through her own kind of hell. Her journal for the novel indicates that she lived in fear of her status as a Jew, clearly aware of the concentration camps and the threat they posed to her family. She wondered if she would be able to continue to receive payment for the books she has already published, which were keeping her family alive. She sent her children out of Paris to escape the advancing German armies, and then she and her husband joined her children in the country because Paris has become too dangerous for them as well. None of that personal drama appears in the novel. And yet a reader today who encounters the author’s bio before reading the novel  can’t help but filter the story through that information and be amazed at her portrayal of the occupation.

The last half of that sentence from her journal—“let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life”—is about her adopted homeland, the country Némirovsky had been living in for over two decades. Her author’s eye meant that she could not simply watch the events unfold in front of her. She took in life, with all its brilliant beauty and gut-wrenching pain, as a writer.

She lays France bare with a series of vignettes, brief snapshots of the lives of French citizens struggling to retain their humanity in the most harrowing of moments. We are introduced to characters like a wealthy man who flees Paris with his car stuffed with Wedgwood porcelain and Sèvres vases, rather than food and supplies; a mother who shows generosity only when it benefits her self-image; and a couple who physically beats a man to steal his food.

These snapshots are nestled in the most gorgeous language describing the lushness of France in June. When she describes nightfall in the countryside: “All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake. Exquisite perfumes filled the air: grass, fresh hay, wild strawberries.” Or even the moment before an attack: “Above, the sky shimmered a pure azure blue: no clouds, no planes. Below, a beautiful glistening river flowed by. In front of them, they could see the road leading south and some very young trees with new green leaves.”

These highs and lows reveal Némirovsky’s intent described in her journal:  “If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show but the prosperity that contrasts with it.” There is misery at every turn in the novel with families torn apart and lives snuffed out because of negligence and cruelty, but there is prosperity, too: in the natural beauty of the land and in the material wealth of certain characters. This is where the novel derives the bulk of its power. The novel does not shy away from setting up contrasts that show us beauty is possible in the midst of war and that the human heart’s complexities fuel our fickle and incomprehensible behaviors.

Read this unfinished (and yet amazingly polished) novel for those contrasts, and for one significant overarching contrast. The novel is about a specific moment in time, yes. But it is bigger than that. Those scenes that take place in the dusty, crowded, chaotic streets leading out of Paris and the preternaturally quiet countryside of France speak to us today.  Némirovsky may have dreamed of a French audience for this novel, but her voice echoes through the generations to speak quite powerfully to today’s readers.