Book Review: All Our Worldly Goods

Article first published as Book Review: All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky on Blogcritics.

After the tremendously successful publication of Irene Némirovsky's posthumously discovered Suite Française, and despite charges of self-hating anti-Semitism in her portrait of the money grubbing business man in Daniel Golder, there has been a renewed interest in getting more of her work out in this country. In 2007 Fire in the Blood, which she was working on when she died in Auschwitz became available, and in 2010 a collection of her stories, Dimanche and Other Stories was published. And now comes another of her novels, All Our Worldly Goods, published in France in 1947, five years after her death and for the first time in this country.

The novel is a shorter version of one of those multi-generational multi-volume family sagas that were a staple of European fiction through the first half of the 20^th century. Némirovsky manages to pack as much melodramatic action into her 250 odd pages as some authors got into their three volumes. There are young lovers agreeing to marry against the wishes of their parents, a broken engagement and a vindictive heiress, an attempted suicide, an autocratic patriarch, and all of this is set around two of the cataclysmic events of the era, World War I and World War II.

The essence of the book is the examination of bourgeois values in a changing society and under the duress modern warfare. It begins with a kind of sepia view of the old values with two families on a beach watching fireworks and a day later the two warring matriarchs riding out to swim in a horse drawn bath cabin. It is a world where parents tell their children what to do and the children do what they're told. It is a world where convention rules and everyone understands their place and what is expected of them, but it is a world on the verge of change. Young people have minds of their own. They don't feel the same kinds of obligation to family, to business, to the social status quo, and their rebelliousness is only increased by the horrendous conflicts reordering their world. It is not as though Némirovsky entirely rejects old world values, in the end there remain those like the responsibility the upper classes feel to set an example for those beneath them and the duty to one's family and country.

In what is a kind of foreshadowing of the epic civilian refugee's retreat from the advancing German army's invasion of Paris during the second World War in Suite Français, Némirovsky has two refugee marches to deal with, although neither with quite the same panoramic overview. Here the author's interest is much more focused on the central characters and their struggles. There are those who no matter what the catastrophe are concerned only with their worldly goods and there are those who rise above those concerns. There are those who can watch the world around them erupting and still dwell on their petty jealousies and there are those who can put the past behind them. There are those who give in to adversity and those who have the spirit to keep fighting. As one of the characters observes, people draw strength from misfortune, the greater the misfortune, the greater the strength.

Némirovsky is a compelling story teller. She rarely gets bogged down in irrelevancies. She has no problem jumping ahead a year or two to move her story apace. The important thing is to avoid burying the significant moments in a mass of trivia, and she manages this with consummate skill. She is adept at analyzing the emotional states of her characters caught in moments of personal crisis even when their world is falling apart around them. All Our Worldly Goods is as richly textured and layered with meaning as many a much longer work.

Mini Review

Up in Honey's Room by Elmore Leonard


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Set in Detroit at the end of WWII: German spies, American symathizers, escaped prisoners of war, perky better dress sales woman, Okie Marshall, this is part of the large cast for this comic take on inept Germans. Too many characters, some get lost by the wayside, but character is not the main thing here. Leonard is having a little fun with the master race, and pointing out the superiority of down home grits and greens.

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Review: Simone de Beauvoir, Wartime Diary

Perhaps it is not always wise to read the diaries or journals of luminaries past and present. Too often these diaries and such dim and darken those shining lights and (to mix metaphors) expose the feet of clay beneath the fine leather boots unshod.

Simone de Beauvoir’s “Wartime Diary” is a case in point. The picture of this twentieth century intellectual giant and feminist icon cavorting with an assortment of her young female students running cavalierly from one bed to another all the while professing her love for both Sartre and Bost, both away at the front, is not particularly flattering, even if one gives her credit for revolting against middle class sexual values. After all, it is 1939. Germany is on the march. The threat of invasion is imminent, even if there is a lull after the first panic. One would think a woman of substance would have something more significant to record in her diary than the complex record of her kisses, quarrels and caresses, something more than her struggle to keep her student girl friends happily supplied with the favor of her company. Couple this with her often dismissive comments on these various lovers [”Vedrine came by; she was neither bothersome nor interesting . . . . we discussed science and politics—there wasn’t anything in it for me, her intelligence being moderate and inferior to mine. I felt bored with her. (p.236). Nathalie Sorokine meets her at a milk bar: “. . . she was sulking, and I let her know it annoyed me.” Later she shows up again “full of hate, but unable to resist the need to see me.” (p.235)] and the picture is even less flattering.

The diary begins in September of 1939. Hitler and the invasion of Poland are on everyone’s mind. She describes the general fear, insecurity and uncertainty of the time. There are the blackouts, the food shortages, but most importantly for de Beauvoir there is her own personal cross, the departure of Sartre for the front. Still the nice thing about anxiety is that it doesn’t last. As the threat of invasion seems to lessen, life gradually becomes calmer, more normal. September 13: “Though gloomy the day was much calmer—one gets used to anything, even to this uncertainty.” (p.60). September 14: “Paris I reopening its movie houses, and even the bars and dance halls are open until eleven o’clock at night. Everything is returning to normal.” (p. 61). Life goes on.

Most of the diary prior to the invasion details her daily life during these early months. She eats in cafes. She goes to movies (“Snow White” which she doesn’t care for and “The Petrified Forest” which she does). She visits friends and lovers. She reads (very eclectically: everything from Jack London and Agatha Christie to Dostoyevsky and Kafka). She goes to concerts and night clubs. She writes letter after letter. But more often than not what seems to concern her is juggling her amours and pining away for Sartre.

The most significant event of this period is undoubtedly her clandestine visit to see Sartre stationed in Brumath, something of an adventure since women were not allowed to visit their husbands let alone their lovers at the front. She left Paris on October 31 by train and they managed to spend about a week together. While the visit seems momentous to her, there is little in the description of their time together to justify her feelings. They eat a few meals together. They spend some time looking for places to stay when he is free. They do a lot of skulking around. Her reticence here is suggestive in the light of her openness about her relations with her lady friends. There is no question but that this time with Sartre is something special.

In general, the reader expects a bit more introspection and self analysis from someone with de Beauvoir’s reputation. It is not really until the very end that there is anything that comes up to these expectations: “I have become conscious again of my individuality and of the metaphysical being that is opposed to this historical infinity where Hegel optimistically dilutes all things. Anguish. I have finally realized the state that I nostalgically longed for last year: solitude, as complete as when facing death. . . . The hope of maintaining one’s very being is the only reason for which I think it is worth accepting death. It’s not a matter of life, but of something more than that. To make oneself an ant among ants, or a free consciousness facing other consciousnesses. Metaphysical solidarity that I newly discovered, I who was a solipsist. I cannot be consciousness, spirit among ants. I understand what was wanting in our antihumanism. To admire man as given (a beautiful intelligent animal etc.) is idiotic—but there is no other reality than human reality—all values are founded on it. And that ‘toward which it transcends itself’ is what has always moved us and orients the destiny of each one of us.” (pp.319-320). A few more passages such as this would have been welcome.
As far as the description of the flight from Paris after the inv
asion is concerned, de Beauvoir is less than compelling. For my money there is a much more effective narration of these events in Irene Nemirovsky’s novel, “Suite Francaise.”

A word about this particular edition of the diary: the translation is very readable. It certainly makes de Beauvoir accessible. The notes, on the other hand, are not always very helpful. There are both footnotes and end notes and one cannot always tell why the distinction. Sometimes the reader has to wonder why the editors even bothered. They love to identify the streets on which the various cafes de Beauvoir mentions are located. Why? They do identify passages in the diary that are reused in her other work and this is certainly useful for scholars, if not necessarily the general reader.

What the diary provides for the reader is a real insight into the character of de Beauvoir and her relationships with Sartre and others, if it is not always illuminating in regard to her ideas.