A fortuitous find

I am always one book short of clinical depression without a book to look forward to. Sometimes I feel that I have read everything worth reading by my crochety tastes, andf will be stuck re-reading "When Patty Went to College" for the rest of my life.

  Then I get lucky.  On a pile of discards at the Good Will, I discovered "All Our Worldly Goods" by Irene Nemirovsky.  I almost skipped it because I noted that the author had been killed in the Holocaust and I thought her work might be gloomy and depressing. Au contraire!


I find it difficult to express  anything positive or approving about a book or movie.  Dislike is so much easier to articulate.  Nemirov, though, delighted me.  I think you will like her work if you like Tolstoy, or maybe Balzac.   The milieu is bourgeous France between the wars, and she is a keen observer of manners and mores, with a dazzling lightness of touch. 

  I downloaded another of her books to my Kindle, "Suite Francaise," which is even better, also taking place just before the German defeat, a period of great despair, confusion, and hysteria in France.  The advancing German troops disrupt everyone's lives and turn everyone into a refugee.  The fabric of society is torn and can never be reclaimed.  Except it is, after a fashion.

  Read the damn book!