Staff Recommends

Best of 2006

Comments (0) By Tom Christie Wednesday, Dec 20 2006

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Fifty years after novelist Irène Némirovsky was arrested by French police and shipped off to Auschwitz, her daughter opened what she believed to be her mother’s wartime journals and found instead the first two of a projected five novellas. Published in France in 2004, Suite Française is nothing less than an account of life under German occupation as it was happening. Now said to be the first work of fiction about wartime France, this lucid, precisely observed book casts a jaundiced but humane eye on the folly of occupiers and occupied alike, eking terror and comedy from their struggle to survive under absurd conditions. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine, Némirovsky converted to Catholicism in France. It didn’t help: She died, aged 39, a month after her arrival in Auschwitz. Now her rigorous, generous vision returns to remind a generation conditioned by upbeat Hollywood endings that oppression is evil not because it happens to saints or heroes, but because it is evil. —Ella Taylor

Knopf | 416 pages | $25 hardcover

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The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

First of all, there are the sandhill cranes, which are on the endangered list yet manage each February to turn a stretch of Nebraska’s Platte River into a swarming metropolis of the snowy creatures, a Manhattan of lowing, child-size birds. A pickup truck flips over. Its driver wakes up in the hospital with Capgrass syndrome, a rare form of brain damage whose victims suspect that the people and places closest to them have been replaced with imposters, kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers — and then the hijinx ensue. Capgrass syndrome is a very postmodern disease. Powers is a very postmodern novelist, the favorite son of the population a Venn diagram might show as the intersection of NYRB subscribers, those who take the Scientific American, and those who read orchestral scores for fun. Powers is nothing if not fugal in his riffage, especially here — this is probably his best since the even more fugal Goldbug Variations. If you are going to buy only one novel this year about an obscure yet poetic neuropsychiatric disorder, this should be the one. —Jonathan Gold

Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 464 pages | $25 hardcover