The main character in the second half of Irene Nemirovsky’s novel Suite Francaiseis a young French woman named Lucile. She lives with her mother-in-law, Madame Angellier, in a large house in a farming village outside Paris. It is 1941, Lucile’s husband is away fighting the Germans who have occupied France.

Life becomes complicated for Lucile and her mother-in-law when a German officer is billeted in their home. Madame Angellier is deeply suspicious and resentful of her daughter-in-law’s growing relationship with the enemy officer living in her house. The relationship between Lucile and Madame Angellier becomes increasingly strained throughout the second half of the book.

Nemirovsky sums up the main theme of her novel in the words of a thought sequence she puts in Lucile’s mind.

It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it. It is the most fascinating and the most dreadful of spectacles, she continued thinking, the most dreadful because it’s so real; you can never pride yourself on truly knowing the sea unless you’ve seen it both calm and in a storm. Only the person who has observed men and women at times like this, she thought, can be said to know them. And to know themselves.

Life is complicated. The world is a messy place. People are confusing. Our “enemies” turn out to be gentle, polite and kind. We discover they have children and families of their own who they love and with whom they struggle just like us.

The loyal citizens of our country, in defeat, become informers and traitors to their fellow citizens. Nothing is as it appears on the surface. Truth is elusive; human relationships become uncertain as loyalties constantly shift in an environment of fear and mistrust.

Nemirovsky paints a picture of a world that feels terribly familiar even to those of us who have never had the misfortune of living through a war. But, it does not take “the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it.” The complex reality of life is present everywhere we look for anyone with eyes open to see.

It is always possible for those who are willing to face the realities of life to learn that “you can never pride yourself on truly knowing the sea unless you’ve seen it both calm and in a storm. Only the person who has observed men and women at times like this, she thought, can be said to know them. And to know themselves.”

The wisdom in Suite Francaise is that we only truly learn the lessons of life when we are willing to see life in all its complexities and contradictions. People are not just good or bad. Events are never all dark or all light. The comfortable dualisms with which we delude ourselves are simply illusions we impose upon life in an attempt to find a safe corner in which to hide from the uncertainties and doubts that will assail us whenever we behold life whole.

We diminish ourselves and the rest of life when we divide everything into good and bad as if the lines were clearly marked on a tidy map supplied for our guidance. There are no straight lines. We do the best we can to find our way in the mass of contradictions, compromises and confusions that make up the often chaotic world in which we live. We know, if we are honest, that we are all caught in the chaos. None of us is without conflicted emotions, divided loyalties, and contradictory intentions.

Tragically, we will never know where Irene Nemirovsky was hoping to go with her insights into the twisted reality that makes up life. The two parts of the book that make up Suite Francaise were intended to be the first two parts of a five part fiction cycle. Probably Nemirovsky herself, writing in the midst of the chaotic circumstances of war torn France, was not clear where she was headed in her writing. The conclusion of her novel was cut short by her arrest and death in Auschwitz.

Like everything in life Suite Francaise remains an unfinished work.

The mess of life caught up with Nemirovsky. Her witness to the possibility of bearing the whole of life was silenced too early. We who continue in the often bewildering journey of life, honour her memory when we choose to embrace all of life in all its complexity. We honour the truth she saw when we refuse to turn away from those dark and confusing parts of life we might wish to change.