Suite Française

I'm floating from my reading this week. The Accidental was so magnificent that I'd read it in little bites, holding off finishing it as long as I could. Then Suite Francaise arrived on my doorstep and it, too, was so excellent I could barely believe it.

This week it has felt like Harrison Ford and Sean Connery both insisted on accompanying me to the prom.

What an amazing story to go along with Suite Francaise! (I keep waiting for some horrible Million Little Pieces revelation to come out about it...please, please, don't let this happen.) The book was written in the early 1940's by a woman who died at Auschwitz. The manuscript was saved in a suitcase all these years by the author's daughters who assumed it was a memoir and could not bear to read it.

Beautiful writing. Beautiful. The story flows, weaving around the cast of characters, in a place that felt so real I kept wanting to stop and breathe it in.

The story centers on the mass exodus from Paris as the Germans are taking over France. Last fall, my family and I fled south Texas as Hurricane Rita crept closer and closer to our homes; I connected completely with this story.

Suite Francaise is almost too good to be true, almost like I slipped inside a time machine, with a tour guide to boot. Reading it makes me want to send out a worldwide call to everyone to search their houses, to scramble through those old suitcases, to ramble through the attics; if even one more paragraph like those in Suite Francaise would result from the search, it would be worth it.