Richibi’s Weblog

“Madonna and Child Pentaptych“

Luca di Tommè

__________

“Suite française“, had it not been for
its musical associations, would’ve
been called a “quintette”

a suite is, of course, a series of five
dance movements, a sarabande, a
minuet, a gigue, for instance, most
commonly with reference to Bach’s
Baroque masterpieces

which is to say that without its dance
implications, a suite would’ve been
called simply a sonata with five
movements, or a duet, trio, quartet,
and so forth, depending on the
participating instruments

in fiction, a sequence of five books
equals a quintet, see Durrell’s
“Avignon Quintet“, for instance

in art, five panels are called a
pentaptych, see above

five books had been intended for her
“Suite française“, but in 1942 their
author, Irène Némirovsky, was arrested
for being Jewish, and died later at
Auschwitz, she’d completed only two
of her intended manuscripts, a tragic
account of day-to-day life during the
Second World War

these texts were only discovered by her
daughters in 1998, who then had them
published in 2002, in just one volume
called “Suite française“

the superb movie came out last year

it’s a whiff of another era, a
recollection of things past

also a timely consideration of the
flawed foundations of any occupation,
I thought

Richard

psst: incidentally, in French, capital
letters are eschewed – gesundheit –
after the first initial, therefore
the French title, “Suite française“,
sports a lower case f

the film, “Suite Française“ uses
the English construction