January 21st 2012
All Our Worldly Goods
All Our Worldly Goods. Irene Nemirovsky. 1947/2008. Vintage Books. Translated from the French by Sandra Smith. (French title: Les Biens de ce Monde.) 265 pages.
They were together, so they were happy.
What All Our Worldly Goods lacks in characterization, it more than makes up for in beautiful writing. Nemirovsky’s novel has great atmosphere: a rich, detailed setting. The characters are more simple than complex human beings, but, I think there are enough presented to get a flavor of what life was like across the generations in the troubled decades between the start of World War I and the beginning of World War II.