A Bride’s Veil
Title: All Our Worldly Goods
Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Publisher: Vintage International
Length: 264 pages
Sometimes you pick up a book with too much expectation. I find I do that with all Irene Nemirovsky’s books. The whimsical 1940’s images, the promise of a love story and a certain level of French-ness, the heartbreaking knowledge that the author didn’t survive the holocaust… of course all her work immediately sounds enticing. You get a warm fuzzy and desperate feeling just looking at the cover (kudos to the marketing department), but those warm fuzzies are so intense, how could an author possibly live up to that? (Unless you’re Audrey Niffenegger, who lives up to all her book covers.)
I had a hard time getting into Suite Francaise, but its saving grace was listening to the symphony the novel was modeled after. In that light, the work became amazing, but only for the writing itself not because of the story. I say this years after reading the book with certainty because I cannot remember the story or any of the characters. If I can’t remember them, they surely could not have moved me that much.
I got the overwhelming desperate sensation to read All Our Worldly Goods at the library a few weeks ago, but like Suite Francaise, I picked it up to read and was only moderately interested. The characters seem riveting in theory, but a few paragraphs into chapter five I realize that I kind of want to know what happens but am not that moved by the people. It doesn’t help that I don’t feel well and Nemirovsky is NOT good home with the flu reading. To be fair with her work, I feel as though I need to be at a coffee shop tucked away in a dark corner without the presence of my two-year old. Maybe it’s because of sentences like: “It was a November day; the skies wept softly; the wind danced in a bride’s veil; the carriage crushed the last reddish leaves.”
I probably won’t be finishing this particular book. I have to turn it into the library tomorrow or face fines and I cannot renew it because it’s on a waiting list. I’m not disappointed about not being able to finish it, though, and I have no desire to rush to the store and find a copy for myself. Instead, I want to find out who that person is and have a conversation with them once they hit chapter five. How do you feel? Is it living up to your expectations? Or does her work leave you a little bit depressed and unsatisfied?
Funny that the sentence, of all sentences, that I plucked off the page to use in this post as I was writing it was one metaphorically using a bride’s veil. My husband and I were just talking about bride’s veils – and their purpose – the other day. I didn’t wear a veil. I’m not too keen on veils. “Veils were for arranged marriages when the groom had never seen the bride before and was restricted from seeing how ugly she was until after he was stuck,” my husband laughed. We can’t remember why this topic came up: a commercial? a Doctor Who episode? Pinterest images? Who knows? The point is, that’s how I feel about Nemirovsky’s work. The book is laced in the most beautiful veil ever to be seen, intricate and finely placed descriptions and pictures on the dust jacket. Then you start reading the book and realize, the bride is not ugly per se, but she’s just not as beautiful as I was led to believe. She’s nice, she’s alright, but she’s no super model. And I’m a groom who feels stuck with something of little interest when I expected and wanted something amazing.
Anakalian Whims 
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