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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Janice Kulyk Keefer
If you read only one piece of fiction this year, read Irène Némirovsky's miraculous last novel. Suite Française is miraculous for the power, brilliance and beauty of the writing, and for the very wholeness of the work, despite its being less than half the 1,000 pages its author intended.
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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
A magnificent novel of the insidious devastation of occupation, and Nemirovsky is brilliant and heroic, summoning up profound empathy for all, including regretful German soldiers. Everything about this transcendent novel is miraculous. [1 Apr 2006, p.20]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A valuable window into the past, and the human psyche. This is important work. [1 Apr 2006, p.319]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Nemirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing--with compassion and clarity--on individual human dramas. [13 Mar 2006, p.41]
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
The two novellas - which total about 400 pages - vividly and ironically describe the character of the French people under Nazi occupation with an almost casual brilliance.
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Susan Rubin Suleiman
An astonishing work.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Richard Eder
In the light of what happened to Némirovsky, her vision is remarkable.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Paul Gray
The improbable survival of her two novellas is a cause for celebration and also for grief at another reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Tom Payne
This can feel like reportage. But it is reportage at its very finest, bound together by high artistic purpose.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Anne Chisholm
It is quite outstanding, full of beauty, pain and truth.
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Outstanding
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Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer
The two completed sections of the novel - particularly the first - are constructed in a manner that recalls Bach's contrapuntal style, where individual thematic strands mingle and sometimes stray as far as harmonic integrity allows.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Helen Dunmore
Incomplete as it is, lacking the revision that its author undoubtedly wished to give it, the narrative is eloquent and glowing with life. Its tone reflects a deep understanding of human behaviour under pressure and a hard-won, often ironic composure in the face of violation.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Boyd Tonkin
Suite Française, even in this truncated form, is a magnificent work that its readers will cherish for as long as they still care about the art of fiction or the history of Europe.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Ruth Kluger
The perfect mixture: a gifted novelist's account of a foreign occupation, written while it was taking place, with history and imagination jointly evoking a bitter time, correcting and enriching our memory.
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Outstanding
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The Nation Alice Kaplan
It's impossible not to think of the miracle of Némirovsky's surviving last words when you're reading, and this context gives the book an importance, a shimmering sense of surplus value.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Earl L. Dachslager
An extraordinary work, an astonishing blend of fiction and fact, history and storytelling. As such, we should note that its unfinished condition is one more tragedy to be counted among the other millions of that time and place.
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Favorable
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The Independent Robin Buss
The second half, "Dolce", is not so effective...Némirovsky, so good at describing death, manages only banalities when it comes to love.
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Favorable
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The Observer Jane Stevenson
Hindsight would have brought more art, but something valuable would have been lost.
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Mixed
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London Review Of Books Dan Jacobson
Neither 'Storm in June' nor 'Dolce' seems to me to work satisfactorily as a novel...All I can say is that though Némirovsky is truly seized by her subject, she does not seem to have found the form that would have enabled her to carry through the Tolstoyan task she had set herself. If she had, 'Storm in June' would indeed be the masterpiece which some of its more generous reviewers have declared it to be.
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