Elisabeth Gille was five years old when her mother was taken to Auschwitz and didn't return. Her father suffered the same fate a few months later. She and her older sister survived when a German officer saw the older girl's blonde hair and told their governess they were not taking any children that night. The governess understood. She and the children disappeared.
Decades later, when she was older than her mother ever became, and although she remembered nothing about her, Elisabeth tried to see the world through her mother's eyes. That attempt is The Mirador. Her mother was the once acclaimed, then forgotten, then reclaimed, writer Irene Nemirovsky.
In pre-WWII France, Nemirovsky was greatly admired for her novels such as David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker who loses, then regains, a fortune. Reactions to this novel and Nemirovsky's writings in right-wing journals before her death made her a controversial figure as well as a celebrated writer. She was forgotten for years until her oldest daughter, Denise, found the manuscript of Suite Française among her mother's papers. Versions of another work of fiction, Fire in the Blood, was found in these papers and in papers Nemirovsky left with her banker husband, Michel Epstein.
In The Mirador, Gille writes from her mother's point of view about being raised in a secular home of a rich banker where the tenents of their family's heritage were never celebrated. She imagines her mother coming of age during the Russian Revolution, moving back and forth from the gilded cities of Russia as that world crumbled and Paris. Irene is portrayed as preternatural, a wise beyond her years woman child who nontheless has no clue about how dire her family's situation is. Instead, she is wrapped up in resentment of her mother, who spends her evenings with varied men friends while her father travels the world on business, and her books. It is a lovely world, and the fact we know it will soon disappear adds to its poignant elegance.
After the revolution and her family's safe return to France, there is a gap in the story. Now it's 1942 and Irene has married and given birth to two daughters. Their neighbors in the village where they moved are starting to shun them. A daughter needs emergency surgery; one neighbor finally succumbs to human kindness to take the child to another village to find one doctor who finally agrees to perform the surgery, then immediately sends the girl back. The family will lose their Parisian apartment; relatives make one last trip to retrieve some valuables they can sell to live on.
First her husband's employer refuses to help them, then Irene discovers that her belief that they are safe because she is a famous French writer is false. The literary establishment that once embraced her as a talented young woman who came to them from Russia is as unable to stand up to the Nazis as the rest of mainstream French society.
At the end of each chapter is a short look at Irene from the viewpoint of her daughter years later, adding to the feeling of impending doom.
If viewed only as a work of fiction, The Mirador has a flimsy quality to it; its strengths are more in the way of capturing certain scenes such as wintry sleigh rides and helpless aristocrats trapped in a hotel rather than a tightly woven narrative. As a way to try to come to terms with a complicated woman's life and complicated outlook, however, The Mirador is an emotionally open work that makes the reader feel compassion toward its author and her aims. It also sparks new interest in examining all of Nemirovsky's works in a new light, especially her most famous, incomplete work.
The Mirador is called "fictionalized biography", about as hybrid as a genre can be. It's like the other side of the coin to narrative nonfiction that takes true elements as much as the Gille book does, but retains its right to be called nonfiction rather than fiction. The line is a thin one. But perhaps it's more honest for an author to call a work fiction with elements that are real rather than calling a work nonfiction when parts of the story are fictionalized (as in James Frey). According to an article on Gille by Alan Astro online at the Jewish Women's Archive, the technique wasn't original with Gille:
While that narrative strategy might surprise us, it had been used five years earlier by another Jewish writer in France. Pierre Pachet, in his Autobiographie de mon père, speaks in his father’s voice to tell his father’s story, including his wartime experiences and his survival.
In Gille's case, it can strike right at the heart of the child envying the parent. This is her imagining her mother as her parents, Gille's grandparents, prepare for a night out:
I envied her, especially the protective arm that my father placed around her shoulders and his satisfied, proprietary look. But on that particular night, I did not hold it against her.
Soon thereafter, the fictionalized Irene recounts how her mother gave her a beautiful doll as a Christmas present, the last thing a book-loving daughter wanted. She was devastated, and when her mother entertains young men while her banker father is away on long business trips, she dumps the expensive doll out of a window while mother and daughter are traveling on the Orient Express. Gille's writing is intense:
I had seen my mother in a low-cut dress, opening the door to her compartment to an elegant young man with pomaded hair and taking his arm as they headed toward the cafe car. Our eyes met and I watched her walk away, after which I took the repulsive object by the hair, lowered the window pane and, with great difficulty because of her size and the wind and cold that rushed into the compartment, thrust her overboard.
That part rings true, but the rest of the paragraph does not:
I hope that some German or Austrian crossing-guard's daughter found her intact in the snow, and was able to love her.
The odd moments like that make the work feel more like an honest attempt to write a fictionalized account. Like the tiny errors purposefully woven into an intricate rug, these moments keep the whole work from being perfect. And that's actually the right thing, because of what Gille was dealing with. When she writes that the ficitonal Irene's mother does not want to become a grandmother and that Irene admits to feeling conflicted about her, wanting to see her constantly in tears, the reader wonders what Gille thinks of her real mother, the one who died. Did she envy her anything? Did that woman become perfect in memory because of her fate? And that memory is only for those who knew her, something that was denied to the daughter writing as her mother.
According to Rene de Ceccatty, who wrote the preface to the New York Review of Books Classics edition, anything the reader comes across is solely because Gille had to overcome the difficulty of being a writer's daughter. And not just any writer, but one who was murdered by the Nazis. Gille herself died in 1996 after writing three books; she lived to be only four years older than her mother, who died at the age of 39. The loss of both before either had the opportunity to explore further the intricacies of human feeling permeates this work.