Our Reading Program Continues: Suite Francaise

February 13th, 2008 by admin

So we are, of course, a tad bit behind on our now-impossible goal of reading a book a week, but we have, indeed, finished Out of Africa—it was amazing! Really, we could not recommend it more highly, highly, highly. But we’re a bit stuck on the Seneca, and we have no choice but to move on to Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky—one of those books we’re pretty sure we’re reading about a year behind everybody else. We think we forgot to mention that one of our goals with all this is to read only books written before 1950, just because when we read contemporary fiction, we get all insecure and out of sorts and start wondering why we’re not working on our own books, instead of watching South Park.

Anyhoo, we’re just starting this, but we know it’s going to be amazing. The opening chapter was amazing. We use the word, too often, to describe, say, how much we like English muffins, but we are sure it is deserved here. Even more amazing was one of the appendices, which we jumped ahead and read: It’s the correspondence between the husband and friends of the author, after she was, terribly, taken away from her home in France as a "stateless Jew"—she and her husband were Russian, with French children, and practicing Catholics in any case—and … well, it’s too depressing to get into, really. She’s warned by her editor: