GR reference in NYT article on French novella

[Ben Yadon]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/books/review/09gray.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
"Storm in June," the first novella of "Suite Française," opens as
German artillery thunders on the outskirts of Paris and those
residents who have trouble sleeping in the unusually warm weather hear
the sound of an air-raid siren: "To them it began as a long breath,
like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its
wailing filled the sky." (Thomas Pynchon also hadn't heard of "Suite
Française" while he was writing "Gravity's Rainbow," but compare his
opening sentence, set in London, a few years later, same war: "A
screaming comes across the sky."

THIS stunning book contains two narratives, one fictional and the
other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into
being. "Suite Française" itself consists of two novellas portraying
life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade
Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops
leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union. At the end of
the volume, a series of appendices and a biographical sketch provide,
among other things, information about the author of the novellas. Born
in Ukraine, Irène Némirovsky had lived in France since 1919 and had
established herself in her adopted country's literary community,
publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed "Suite
Française" in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and
two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942,
French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky
as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to
Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17.