{"id":550,"date":"2010-10-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-07T00:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=550"},"modified":"2024-12-31T14:23:44","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T01:23:44","slug":"jezebel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2010\/10\/30\/jezebel\/","title":{"rendered":"Jezebel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ir\u00e8ne N\u00e9mirovsky<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Random House<\/em><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, October 30th 2010<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First published in 1936, Jezebel<\/em> is the latest of Ir\u00e8ne N\u00e9mirovsky\u2019s novels to be republished for an English readership.  It opens on the trial of a woman for the murder of her much younger lover, a crime to which she freely admits.  Offering no word of explanation or defence, she sits wearily in the dock as the hearing progresses, her beauty and presence fading as the watching public loses interest in her.  By the time sentence is passed, she has become a woman whose past and future are interest to no one.  The remainder of the novel reveals the nature and history of the accused, laying out the events that culminate in violence and death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raised in a loveless household by a mother she detests, happiness and freedom are unknown to Gladys Eysenrach until the summer she turns 18 and attends her first ball.  Suddenly she is transformed from sad, powerless child to a woman so beautiful she brings men to their knees, and from this moment onwards a life in which she is not desired and desirable becomes meaningless.  For many years this is easily achieved, but as Gladys ages and experiences her first tastes of rejection, she becomes desperate to maintain the illusion of youth and beauty.  She interprets her daughter\u2019s approaching adulthood as a deliberate attack on her happiness and refuses to acknowledge the existence of her grandson, the action leads inexorably to the tragedy that opens the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the outset I felt some degree of sympathy for the protagonist.\u00a0 This is a society where women are held to a different standard than men; Gladys is depicted as a heartless seductress condemned by a history of sexual impropriety by the prosecution, and as a desperate, jealous and pitiable creature by the defence.\u00a0 The unfaithfulness of her regular lover, meanwhile, is regarded as both understandable (given her age) natural.\u00a0 My compassion quickly evaporated in the face of her incomparable selfishness, however.\u00a0 Gladys may be a victim of her own childhood, but she is also a perpetrator of the same maternal failings, obsessed with her own happiness to the exclusion of everything and everybody else.\u00a0 Although her actions are driven insecurity and the need to hide her true age as much from herself as from others, this does not exonerate her.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This pitiless depiction makes for produces a powerful and affecting novel, but not one that is easy to read, and I couldn\u2019t help interpreting it in light of the author\u2019s own life. N\u00e9mirovsky\u2019s relationship with her own mother was very troubled (she was kept dressed as a child well into adolescence just as Gladys\u2019s daughter is) and it is easy to hear the echoes of her own hurt and anger throughout the narrative.\u00a0 The first chapter is not only a synechdote of Gladys\u2019s life, it also encapsulates the novel as a whole; just as those watching the trial tired of her company, I soon found I did not care about her at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/nemirovsky-places-woman-much-herself-dock<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ir\u00e8ne N\u00e9mirovsky<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Otago Daily Times review October 30th 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[115,370,421,111,18],"class_list":["post-550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-115","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-irene-nemirovsky","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}