“Few of us will forget the the experience of discovering Irène Némirovsky’s powerful Suite Française and the equally powerful and disturbing details of her life. Now we can rediscover Némirovsky through this novel, a fictionalized biography written by her daughter and published [in French] in 1992, where it helped precipitate a reexamination of this remarkable author’s work. Gille was just a few years old when her mother, a Russian émigré much celebrated in France, was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where she died within months. Through research and, more significantly, imagination, she has re-created her mother’s life . . . Gille writes in a style at once lyric and focused, periodically introducing her alter ego’s dispassionate reflections as an adult. As Gille concludes, Némirovsky ‘will remain thirty-nine for all eternity,’ and that painful realization resonates throughout this beautiful book.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
“This new translation of a work published almost 20 years ago in Europe will add to the fascination with Némirovsky. We are compelled anew as Némirovsky asks through the facing mirrors of a fictionalized self-portrait once removed, ‘What could one say of the times I was living in, plagued by revolutions, pogroms, and interminable wars?’ It is fascinating to ponder a daughter’s occupying her artist-mother as a young woman haunted by the strained relationship with her own mother—a woman self-centered to the point of passing off Irène as her younger sister.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Mirador approaches the ambiguity in Némirovsky’s life and work in a profound and empathetic way. Gille is not interested in defending her mother’s reputation. Instead, she sets out to live in her mother’s head.”
—Alice Kaplan, The Nation
“Gille, who spent World War II in hiding and later became a book editor in France, manages to conjure up a vivid, believable picture of her mother’s inner life as well as the tumultuous world that shaped her . . . We will never know whether the The Mirador, originally published in France in 1992, is an accurate reflection of her mother’s feelings and observations. Nonetheless, the book stands as a nuanced, eloquent portrait of a complicated woman.”
—Nora Krug, The Washington Post
“I have never before come upon a book at once as loving and as devastating as The Mirador by Élisabeth Gille, the daughter of Irène Némirovsky. Némirovsky, it will be remembered, is the popular French-Jewish society novelist of the interwar era who came to attention in the United States and elsewhere after the discovery of Suite Française, her unfinished epic about the war years in France . . . The Mirador, which seeks to explore Némirovsky’s errors even if it cannot entirely excuse them, is an affecting and beautifully written book. The subtitle is “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter,” but the book is written in the voice of Némirovsky herself, as a kind of ventriloquized autobiography—the autobiography that Némirovsky might have written.”
—Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
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