A review by whats_margaret_reading
Jezebel by Irène Némirovsky

4.0

I was very excited when this was finally released in an American edition. I'm a big fan of Nemirovsky, and this novel is quite similar to her other works. No one is quite as they appear, and no one is safe from showing how simple, greedy, or flawed they really are. The style is similar to her other works, and Jezebel was first published in French in the late 1930's, before All Our Worldly Goods was published and Suite Francaise was begun. The courtroom start makes the novel surprisingly modern, and the work up to the events described in the testimony are similar to watching a car wreck in reverse (in the best possibly literary way, of course!). The ending was a bit transparent, and other than Gladys' descent into emotional old age the novel could have gone to the end a bit more expediently. All in all, this novel is another addition to Nemirovsky's too early shortened literary canon.