Fiction: Night was falling but the Péricands' car was still waiting outside their door. Tied to the roof was the soft deep mattress that had adorned their marital bed for 28 years.
Fixed to the roof were a pram and a bicycle. They were trying in vain to cram in all the family's bags, suitcases and overnight cases, as well as the baskets containing the sandwiches, the thermos flasks, bottles of milk for the children, cold chicken, ham, bread and the boxes of baby cereal for the elder Monsieur Péricand. There was also the cat's basket.
Suite Française consists of two short novels. The first, Storm in June, describes the flight from Paris of several different families and individuals in June 1940, just before the Nazis occupied the city. Although Anita Brookner's description of the book as "a nightmare in which the author is entirely embedded" is true in a sense, since Némirovsky wrote it during the occupation, it can be more accurately described as a social-historical comedy. Caught up in one of history's nightmares they may be, but her characters don't lose their warts because of that. Rather the opposite: danger exacerbates their nasty sides and Némirovsky delineates their foibles with merciless clarity. Storm in June is a vivid account of a terrible historical event seen from the perspective of a multiple cast of people, and of one cat; it is also a savage analysis of the French class system and the privilege money confers in war as in peace. It is highly entertaining and very funny.
In this novel, Némirovsky introduces a large cast of characters, some of whom she planned to deal with in greater depth in later books. It has, inevitably, a mise en scène aspect - there are an awful lot of people on the run and although they are intriguing one loses track of some of them.
In the second novel, Dolce, she begins to focus on a smaller selection of humanity. This piece is set in the idyllic village of Bussy, the charms of which are richly delineated. This section is, as the title implies, more pastoral, the pace slower, the whole thing more satisfying. Specifically it deals with the relationship of the villagers, high and low, with the occupying German forces - the conflict of patriotism with normal human feeling, of the group versus the individual, is incisively explored. Friendship develops between the occupiers and the occupied. The villagers realise they are supposed to hate them, but in fact the soldiers are revealed to be not just human, but often kind and lovable. Too lovable on occasion: finally it is a sexual jealousy rather than any more political passion which precipitates the crisis of the story, which ends, poignantly, with the departure of the regiment after a big midsummer party where everyone has a great time:
"Well, they won't be having a good time for long," the old man said calmly. "I've just heard on the radio that they're at war with Russia." He looked at the sky. "It'll be dry again tomorrow. Not good for the gardens, this weather."
The regiment marches off to catch the train for Stalingrad (I suppose); the village reverts to its sleepy bitching.
IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY INTENDED the two novels of Suite Française to be part of a longer series of books about the war; she had envisaged them as a literary symphony, in five parts, and had thought of Beethoven's Fifth as the template. The work was not finished. In July 1942 Némirovsky was arrested by the French police and in August she died at Auschwitz.
She had been born to a wealthy Jewish family in Kiev, who had fled from Russia to Paris with her family after the October revolution. (Curiously, no mention of Judaism is made in Suite Française.) At the time of her death she was famous, and had published nine novels in French. The manuscript containing this one, as well as notes and a fragmentary diary, was saved by her daughters - their father, Michel Epstein, also a Russian Jew, was gassed some months after Némirovosky's death, and the children, aged five and 12 then, were pursued for the duration of the war by the French police but survived thanks to the help of friends.
A preface explains that the daughters believed the manuscript, written in a minuscule hand in a leather-bound notebook (presumably a very hefty one), was a diary, and could not bring themselves to read it until relatively recently. When they realised it was a novel they sent it to a publisher. It comes with appendices including information about its history, the writer's notes Némirovsky kept while writing, and some plans for the complete work.
THE TRANSLATION READS beautifully - the translator tells us it is creative and interpretative, and one guesses she has done a very good job of transmitting Némirovsky's tone and mood. The writing is so accomplished that it is hard to believe that the original was a work in progress, a first draft.
The tout ensemble - the novels, author's notes, the preface - is totally fascinating. But Suite Française stands on its own literary merit. It is as brilliant a fictional account of the Nazi occupation of France as you could ever hope to read. Its comic irreverence and its celebration of the beauty and absurdity of life make it different from most books about the second World War. That the light- hearted genius of Némirovsky emerged from all that is stunning proof of one way in which the individual can transcend the nightmare of history - by laughing at it.
• Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer
• Suite Française By Irène Némirovsky Translated by Sandra Smith Chatto and Windus, 403pp. £16.99