Some After-the-Fact Thoughts on Suite Française

PERHAPS it was a false memory, but I was certain that I'd once read a review of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française that laid out a convincing and damning argument for the alleged strain of anti-semitism that ran through her writing. But the magazine in which I thought I'd read it — Harper's — held only one review of the book in its flawed but mostly searchable online archives, and the author who I vaguely recalled as having written it — female, I think; Jennifer something? Jessica? — was nowhere near the byline.^[1]

And so I recently approached the book, many years after its appearance as something of a literary sensation, prejudiced by this influential phantom review. Before my eyes had even scanned the first paragraph, I'd long developed a dislike of the author, who, I was convinced, was nothing more than a toadying, resentful, opportunistic turncoat. I was prepared to come across loathsome Jewish characters of hers that perpetuated the nasty stereotype on which the Nazi propagandists capitalized during their feverish attempts to exterminate the one race of people that has done more than any other to raise humanity out of its crude barbarism.

But over the course of the novel's 350 pages I found nothing that I was expecting to find. In fact, in the opening movement, "Storm in June," all the characters are equally base and contemptible in their author's eyes, and none of them, so far as I could tell, was explicitly Jewish. The second movement, "Dolce," views, as the name suggests, its principal characters through a somewhat softer and more forgiving lens; and again, none was painted with the broad brush of the Jewish stereotype. While one could argue that it is the conspicuous absence of Jews and their treatment during German occupation that makes Suite Française suspect, the only real piece of evidence to support these half-recalled accusations of anti-semitism were relegated to the appendix, in which Némirovsky's doomed husband, Michael Epstein, in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to free her from the concentration camp, writes to the German ambassador Otto Abetz:

In none of her books (which moreover have not been banned by the occupying authorities) will you find a single word against Germany and, even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever in her works. [... I]t seems to me both unjust and illogical that the Germans should imprison a woman who, despite being of Jewish descent, has no sympathy whatsoever — all her books prove this — either for Judaism or the Bolshevik regime.

Under similar circumstances, I have to say that I would be just as quick to dissociate myself from my Presbyterian upbringing and Italian ancestry, both of which I regard as incidental details to my existence and neither of which am I particularly attached to as an essential piece of my identity. Few, I should hope, would label me anti-Presbyterian or anti-Italian on account of it. Why, then, when such a thing is written under duress on behalf of a non-practicing Jew (and later convert to Catholicism), would the action open itself to the charge of the subject's own anti-semitism? Or if I were to read Némirovsky's David Golder, purported to be rife with Shylock characters, would it all suddenly make sense? And would, say, an American author's use of negative caricatures of his compatriots in his writing therefore automatically make him anti-American?

The author's purported politics and antipathies aside, from a purely technical standpoint, Suite Française as a novel is rather good, though not much more than that. Némirovsky is a deft hand at the sneering aside that cuts through her characters' grandiosity and self-deception, but it has the unwelcome effect of making them so many pins to be knocked down. Although the author's merciless gaze throughout "Storm" was refreshingly honest in many respects, the complexities and ambivalence of "Dolce" made for better reading and more credible characters. In this regard, Suite Française was a victim of its hype as well as its controversy; very few novels could have measured up to the giddy welcome like the one it received upon its first English-language publication in 2004.

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An after-the-fact footnote to these after-the-fact thoughts: The article, I just discovered, was "Scandale Française" by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic. The article is no longer available on the magazine's website, though there are still traces of the feathers it ruffled. ↩

Facebook Login (Hey, Google, Over Here!)

HAVE a look at this article on Facebook's evolving and increasingly ubiquitous OpenID-type login and then take a gander at the (fifteen pages of!) comments. What amazes me is how clearly the conversation is divided into two tiers — although I'm not entirely sure how many misspelled, CAPS LOCK-ridden pleas for access in the bottom one are legit or are simply rabble-rousing.

John Gruber has one Apple-related take on it. The other aspect to consider in this unintentional social experiment is how much more freely the angry, half-literate users will be able to offer themselves up for identity fraud or move through the lock-and-key barriers of the Web when Facebook's OpenID login becomes more ubiquitous. I'd like to think that the easier access will give them scores of opportunities for self-edification, but the cynic in me thinks that they'll just find it easier to leave confused, irate comments on articles they haven't bothered to read and understand.

"Spenden" heißt nicht "stehlen"

IN PREPARATION for the transatlantic move, we put all our 240V electrical goods — Christmas lights, universal power supplies, plug adapters, power strips, surge protectors, telephone gear — in a box in front of our flat with a sign saying that it was there for the taking but that donations were welcome.

The shifty bastard on the fourth floor — the one who comes back late at night boorishly drunk with friends and wakes up our kids, the one who regularly watches movies at such a volume that we can hear the dialogue word for word two floors below — cherry-picked the best items and then scurried back to his flat ... though not without returning immediately thereafter to grab a second haul. Probably about fifty euros' worth of stuff when it was new.

He didn't leave a cent.

I'm growing more and more convinced that Germany doesn't want us to miss it. At all. Instead of Auf Wiedersehen, it would prefer our parting words to be, Gott sei dank, dass wir das los sind!

Cyberchondria

I WAS catching up on old podcasts when I came across the November 13, 2009 episode of On the Media — this segment in particular (audio below) — in which a condition dubbed "cyberchondria" was discussed.

This has some personal significance because it touches on my own experience with being diagnosed with sarcoidosis last October. Confronted with a disease I'd never heard of (imagine me here collapsed to my knees, shaking my fists at the sky and railing, Charlton Heston-like in my anguish, "Where is my awareness month? Where? Where?!"),^[1] I naturally turned to Google to help me find more information. I came across forums and blogs where people discussed sarcoidosis, and more often than not, they related agonizing, emotional, hopeless stories of their lives with the disease. After an hour or two of reading harrowing personal tales in this vein, I became despondent, convinced that my organs were already in the early stages of a grim succession of inevitable collapse.

Seven months after the first symptoms appeared, I'm still alive. My lungs have not given out. I have not gone blind. As I write this, I still have tightness in my chest — it comes and goes, usually along with fatigue and swelling of lymph nodes — but there are no other significant symptoms. The optometrist has said that the granulomas have not spread to my eyes. The radiologist's X-rays show no increased inflammation in my lungs. The pulmonologist has wired me up, stuffed breathing tubes into my mouth, and put me through endurance tests on an exercycle, only to find that everything is functioning as well as or better than it ought to. My general feeling after each one of these appointments is one of mild relief.

That experience differs slightly from rigidly defined cyberchondria, which often begins with self-diagnosis. A pain in the side or, in the case of the reporter interviewed for OtM, a twitch in the eyelid. I had actually been to the doctor that very morning on the day my Internet trawling began, and that doctor had delivered his diagnosis in full confidence. So at that time I wasn't looking to match my perceived symptoms to the appropriate disease, a blind man choosing from a police lineup; I was imagining the already palpable symptoms of a valid disease in their most advanced stages, a morbid exercise in unbridled imagination. However, the feeling of despair that persists despite the accelerated heart rate is, I'd guess, similar to the one that cyberchondriacs feel when they connect the stiffness in their finger to the onset of gangrene.

This is the point where I might be expected to lament that I too was cyberchondria's dupe, to rage at the misleading preponderance of gloomy narratives on those forums, and to curse myself for allowing my vulnerability to cloud my skepticism. Or I might launch into an argument that cyberchondria is yet another media myth, dreamed up by some trend-spotting journalists to shame the gullible, and that nothing but good can come of the surfeit of health information that countless blogs and support forums make available (more often than not via Google) to the layman.

But it's neither of those. And both of them.

I'm grateful to those across the Internet who have recounted their sad experiences with sarcoidosis, because, though dire, they convey the varied and unmitigated potential of this disease. No sugar coating, no punches pulled. From them I know what kind of awful developments the future might hold; though it's mild now, there's no guarantee that sarcoidosis won't take those more menacing forms in my own body later on. And far from resenting OtM for suggesting that we're too irresponsible to handle this egalitarian deluge of unfiltered information, I'm glad to have heard that broadcast, however delayed, because it kept some of those runaway fears I had at the outset in check. Often we need to be shown the extremes in order to find our way to the balance at the center.

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Apparently there is a National Sarcoidosis Awareness Day, maybe in October, and there might even be a whole month devoted to it, which might possibly be in April, but no one seems to know for sure. ↩

The Tragically Hip

"THAT'S the sort of thing that happens when a Guardian film writer, literary web editor and arts writer get together after hours over a bottle of red wine."

Oh, Dame Higgins, spare us your sophistication.

Not to mention that every suggestion is rubbish.