What happen to a rich family when suddenly she finds herself nomad on the roads and struggles to find food to eat? The invasion of the Germans to France in 1940 surprised the French tranquility that thought that fortification line Mag'ino, lengthwise the border, will protect on them from invasion. The Germans simply circumvented the line and in June approached to Paris. Paris Inhabitants heard the ordnance, and rumors that the Germans approach
began, in spite that the radio continued to report only on victories. Millions of people began to run away from Paris. Rich and poor began to escape in panic. Laden cars with personal items, and millions of pedestrians filled/reached the ways of the leads from Paris to the villages near by.
Irene Nemirovsky, Jewish woman that was murdered in Auschwitz, examine from close how acted the French bourgeoisie in the new situation that was forced on them. She describes a rich family, a
mother and her four
boys, her old father-in-law, famous author and his mistress, couple of employees in the factory, their boss and his mistress, a top prostitute. When their immediate environment is changeable in the form so drastic the hypocrisy and the everyday lies fall from them softly and divulge under every their pettiness and their ugliness.
At start of the way the mother instruct her boys to distribute candies to poor kids. She reminds them that the religion lessons they learned destined to take place in practice . Later she approaches to the store of rural grocery store and find out that the store is completely empty and all the goods in which ceased. She returns to her boys and shout on them not to dare to distribute more candies to others.
All the reproduction effects fell from her at once and remained urge of the beastly survival of a mother condemn on her boys. In the second part of the
book she described the collaboration between the conquerors Germans to the French in a little village where the Germans settled. These most compound relations. On one hand the French hated the Germans that won them, debased them, entered to live in their homes and took from them horses, food and different goods. On the other hand, the everyday closeness creates human situations.
There is a description of a girl that her husband didn't liked her so much is in the captivity and a German officer that his wife that whom he didn't like is far away from him, lives in her house. They find a mutual language on base of their love to books and music and they refuse to refer to each other as hostile as he mother in low requires. Their interconnections develop almost to romantic relationship but then it was amputated when the woman agree to conceal un her house a French that killed German and she suddenly feel that she in not interested any more in the contact with the German.
Appendixes were attached to the book: Introduction on the author annals, comments that she wrote to the book and letters. In her comments to the book she writes that she deliberately described segments from
life and not completes stories. She wanted to give us a slice of life only, segment from continuum of life and heroes, as if that we are viewers in them and we do not know what happened to them before and what will be their fate in future.
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