Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky By Her Daughter
June 20, 2011
Gille "rediscovers her lost voice by restoring that of her mother" in this unusual first-person imagined autobiography of Irène Némirovsky, (Suite Française). Némirovsky witnessed the pogroms of her native Russia and Ukraine, and lived the high life of an émigré in 1920s Paris before being sent to Auschwitz (her children were saved) during WWII. Elegantly written if a bit mechanical (the author was five when her mother was arrested), this new translation of a work published almost 20 years ago in Europe will add to the fascination with Némirovsky. We are compelled anew as Némirovsky asks through the facing mirrors of a fictionalized self-portrait once removed, "What could one say of the times I was living in, plagued by revolutions, pogroms, and interminable wars?" It is fascinating to ponder a daughter's occupying her artist-mother as a young woman haunted by the strained relationship with her own motherâa woman self-centered to the point of passing off Irène as her younger sister.
July 1, 2011
Few of us will forget the experience of discovering Irene Nemirovksy's powerful Suite Francaise and the equally powerful and disturbing details of her life. Now we can rediscover Nemirovksy through this novel, a fictionalized biography written by her daughter and published in 1992, where it helped precipitate a reexamination of this remarkable author's work. Gille was just a few years old when her mother, a Russian emigre much celebrated in France, was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where she died within the month. Through research and, more significantly, imagination, she has re-created her mother's life, from her privileged, samovar-scented youth in St. Petersburg and Kiev (Nemirovksy's horrid mother is particularly well captured), to her flight to France and heady days as an established writer, to the family's increasingly tenuous circumstances as the Germans invaded and occupied France during World War II and friends deserted them. Gille writes in a style at once lyric and focused, periodically introducing her alter ego's dispassionate reflections as an adult. VERDICT As Gille concludes, Nemirovksy "will remain thirty-nine for all eternity," and that painful realization resonates throughout this beautiful book. For all readers of literary fiction.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 1, 2011
A mirador is a turret, window, or balcony from which one can see for milesthe perfect image for Gille's achingly beautiful act of channeling, as she writes from the point of view of her mother, the renowned Russian-born French novelist Ir'ne N'mirovsky, who was killed at Auschwitz when Gille was two. Originally published in France in 1992, the novel was editor and translator Gille's first book (she died in 1996), and it is now available in English for the first time as the N'mirovsky revival continues. Gille's intricately textured and galvanizing dreamed memories constitute a fictionalized memoir of a brilliant, determined, indignant, independent thinker. Ir'ne rebels against her selfish, high-society mother; reads incessantly and writes in secret; absorbs the turmoil of the Russian Revolution; and comes of age exalting in the liberation of emigration. In Paris, she is transformed from a young wife and mother into a literary sensation, then is fatally betrayed. Gille illuminates Ir'ne's psyche with preternatural empathy in this exquisite and moving homage, which is essential for N'mirovsky's growing readership.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)