Sukey's Favorite

Suite Française
By Irène Némirovsky
Highbridge Audio, $39.95
14 hours unabridged, CD
ISBN 1598870203

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There's an amazing back story worthy of a novel itself to Suite Française, superbly read here by Daniel Oreskes and Barbara Rosenblat. Irène Némirovsky, a Ukrainian Jew by birth, was well established in the French literary scene when she began these two extraordinary novellas (five were planned) in 1941. In effect, she was writing in real time, capturing the massive exodus from Paris in June 1940 on the eve of the Nazi invasion and the occupation as it was experienced in a small town through the following year, without the benefit of knowing the war's outcome, without the benefit of time and distance. Yet, she had a profound understanding of how this "most dreadful of spectacles" revealed people in their "multifaceted, contradictory, surprising" complexity—from the kind and heroic to the savagely selfish and base. Némirovsky's prose is elegant, her understanding eloquent. She died in Auschwitz in 1942, but her voice is enduring.

The importance of being Ernest

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Ernest Hemingway said, "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way." And that "best and simplest way," that tough, terse, two-fisted prose, had a profound and lasting influence on American writing. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature the very next year. His books are part of our canon, read in schools and colleges, reread and re-appreciated long after graduation, picked up again for book clubs. Now, his major novels are being recorded by some of the best readers in the business. In fact, you could think of the next six months as "All Hemingway, All the Time." The first three titles, available now from Simon & Schuster Audio, include the biggies—A Farewell to Arms, read by John Slattery; For Whom the Bell Tolls, read by Campbell Scott; and The Old Man and the Sea, read by Donald Sutherland. Seven more will be released in the coming months and all will be available by January 2007. Hearing Hemingway is a treat, his bold immediacy heightened by these strong voices. I can honestly say, with a stylistic nod and a thank you to Papa, I listened and it was good.


American worthies

In recent years, there's been an endless stream (more like a flood) of books on the Founding Fathers, including many bestsellers. I've often wondered, and I'm not alone, why we seem to have an unquenchable appetite for both their celebration and their demystification. Gordon S. Wood, the acclaimed, erudite, but highly accessible scholar of colonial and Revolutionary history explains why in Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, keenly narrated by Scott Brick. Wood offers eight engaging essays on the individual characters of the men now known as the Founding Fathers, the men Thomas Jefferson called "American worthies." Because this country was founded on a set of beliefs, not on common ethnicity, language or religion, Wood suggests that the men who made these beliefs concrete, who framed our unique Constitution, remain important and central to our sense of who we are. They still seem larger than life, their time extraordinary—that one moment when "ideas and power, intellectualism and politics came together in a way never again duplicated in American history." How they combined those two worlds, now so far apart, and what shaped their character is ever intriguing and, as Woods says, "fills us with envy and wonder." Unfortunately, we can't go back to that era, but we can try to understand it. There's much to be said for serious summer listening—give it a try, get smart.


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