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A CERTAIN IDEA OF FRANCE

Saturday, 5th May 2007

One of my minor addictions is the five-best-books feature that the Wall Street Journal runs every weekend. There are always at least a couple of choices that will set me nodding my head or muttering dark thoughts. This time, appropriately enough, the subject is France, Yale professor Howard Bloch selecting the handful of titles that best sum up the country's history and culture. Which work takes pride of place? Irène Némirovsky's wartime novel, Suite Française. I think I must be one of the few people on the planet who didn't think this posthumously published account of the German Occupation lived up to the hyperbole. I hated myself for even thinking that, since Némirovsky - a Russian-born Jew - met such a dreadful end, hunted down by the Vichy authorities before being transported to Auschwitz. Still, I can't help wondering if reviewers were swayed by precisely that biographical element. It's a good book, certainly, but a masterpiece? I don't think so, although I defy anyone not to be overwhelmed by the epilogue, largely consisting of letters written by Némirovsky, her husband, colleagues and officials in the weeks before the net closed in.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly strikes me as an odd choice too. But that's the point of these lists. They're great excuses for going back to your own bookshelves and trying to outwit the professionals. My selection would have to include something by Alistair Horne (Seven Ages of Paris maybe) and I would put my neck on the, er, guillotine by saying that I'd rather read Marcel Pagnol than Proust.