Irene Nemirovsky
Vintage, $28.99, pbk
First published in 1936, Jezebel is the latest of Irene Némirovsky's 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 interesting 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.
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's 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.
At the outset, I felt some degree of sympathy for the protagonist.
This is a society where women are held to a different standard than men; Gladys is depicted as a heartless seductress condemned by the prosecution for a history of sexual impropriety and as a desperate, jealous and pitiable creature by the defence.
The unfaithfulness of her regular lover, meanwhile, is regarded as both understandable and (given her age) natural.
My compassion quickly evaporated in the face of her incomparable selfishness, however.
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.
Although her actions are driven by insecurity and the need to hide her true age as much from herself as from others, this does not exonerate her.
This pitiless depiction produces a powerful and affecting novel, but not one that is easy to read and I couldn't help interpreting it in light of the author's own life.
Némirovsky's relationship with her own mother was very troubled (she was kept dressed as a child well into adolescence, just as Gladys' daughter is) and it is easy to hear the echoes of her own hurt and anger throughout the narrative.
The first chapter is not only a synecdoche of Gladys' 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.
• Dr McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
