All Our Worldly Goods
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the bestselling Suite Française.
Pierre and Agnès 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. Even when war is imminent and Pierre is called up, the old man is unforgiving. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, All Our Worldly Goods points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly...
'A remarkable novel...beautifully translated... Her voice, compassionate yet always shrewd, with its sharp portrait of France at war and during the optimistic and confused Twenties and early Thirties, is always distinctive' Literary Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A world at war ruptures the orderly lives of two French provincial families connected by marriage in this serenely beautiful tale by French novelist N mirovsky (Suite Fran aise). In the northern village of Saint-Elme, early in the 20th century, Pierre, the scion of the Hardelot Paper Mill family, marries Agn s Florent, whose mother is a Parisian widow of the lower middle class. The union defies Pierre's redoubtable grandfather, and the newlyweds are cast out of the village. Yet together they thrive and have a son before Pierre is called to fight in WWI. "He didn't think he would be saved, he alone among thousands of men," yet he is, returning from the front a wounded man. The villagers in tiny Saint-Elme flee the encroaching Germans, lose their husbands and sons in battle, and watch their children grow up only to face another world war. The bourgeois importance of keeping up appearances, so skillfully delineated ("Society relies entirely on nuances," notes Pierre's father, to which his mother replies, "And stupidity."), is both undermined and bolstered by the love between Agn s and Pierre. This is another stunning translation by Smith of the tremendously stirring N mirovsky, who died in Auschwitz at the age of 39.
