All Our Worldly Goods - Hardcover

Némirovsky, Irčne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 070118213X ISBN 13: 9780701182137

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2008

Synopsis

In haunting ways this wonderful, compelling novel prefigures Suite Francaise and some of the themes of Nemirovsky's great unfinished sequence of novels. "All Our Worldly Goods", though, is complete, and exquisitely so - a perfect novel in its own right. First published in France in 1947, after the author's death, it is a gripping story of family life and starcrossed lovers, of money and greed, set against the backdrop of France from 1911 to 1940 between two terrible wars. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations.This is "Balzac" or "The Forsyte Saga" on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close-up with Nemirovsky's characteristically sly humour and clear-eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, telling observation of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, this is Nemirovsky at the height of her powers. The exodus and flow of refugee humanity through the town in both wars foreshadows Suite Francaise, but differently, because this is Northern France, near the Somme, and the town itself is twice razed. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly...It opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach, and ends with a changed world, under Nazi occupation.

About this title

About the Authors

Irčne Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, All Our Worldly Goods, The Dogs and the Wolves and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, such as the posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. She was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evęque (in German occupied territory). It was here that Irčne began writing Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

Sandra Smith is the translator of all 14 novels by Irčne Némirovsky available in English, a new translation of Camus's The Outsider; and The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir (Ecco Press, USA), among many others. Her translation of Nemirovsky's Suite Française won the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens won The National Jewish Book Award. She currently teaches at NYU.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 070118213X
• ISBN 13: 9780701182137
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208