by Irene Nemirovsky
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by Irene Nemirovsky
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David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Irene Nemirovsky |
by Jonathan Weiss
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle) by Mary Ann Shaffer |
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Editorial Reviews
Review
David Golder, the brief account of a Jewish migrant's last and troubled days, was published in 1929. Anecdotal, it dwells on incidental encounters and reflections: conversations with his predatory, adulterous wife, her longtime lover, his fickle, pleasure-loving daughter, a business partner; a tour of the Jewish quarter with an old mate; a trip to his origins which, in a style reminiscent of the mature Némirovsky, ends in a moving portrayal of a final, unrecognised friendship and the picture of another hapless migrant's voyage.
The novel opens in the manner of a thriller, with a suicide offstage. At times it reads like a film script, at others it employs a collagist technique: fragments of satire and gossip, discussions of big business, streams of consciousness which are a confluence of past and present. Its pace is swift, its atmosphere claustrophobic. Though it occasionally shifts perspective from Golder's monologues to a camera's eye view of his wife and daughter and their affairs, its relentless focus is on the revelation of his inner demons.
David, ruthless, venal and ultimately pitiable, dominates the book; its other characters are at best projections of his needs, fears and desires. Possibly the shortcomings of a writer as yet immature, they also bear witness to her unsentimental understanding of the scars of emotional and physical dispossession.
Superficially, David's character bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Daphne du Maurier's monstrous Julius Levi in The Progress of Julius. Both Golder and Levi are Jewish migrants who have fought their way out of adversity; both, paranoid and vulnerable, are obsessed with beautiful, flighty daughters, but with very different outcomes. It's tempting to imagine du Maurier, a frequent visitor to France, reading Némirovsky on holiday and unconsciously appropriating some elements of her work.
Du Maurier's Julius remains a parodic representation of a Jewish parvenu. Némirovsky, however, writing closer to her own preoccupations, strips away Golder's mask, flesh and skin, to reveal the skull of a man damaged by history, prejudice and the failure of love.
In much of her work, Némirovsky's view of the roots her family outgrew is at best cold-eyed and at worst disdainful. It is also self-revealing, and a testament to her refusal to discard any part of her heritage. Francophone, exiled and reassimilated, she continued, in her fiction, to return to the collective past. In this early novel are flashes of the piercin --The Independent --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Review
Praise for the first edition of David Golder:
"The work of a woman who has the strength of one of the masters like Balzac or Dostoyevsky"
–New York Times, 1930
"All Némirovsky’s talent is apparent in her first novel: her pitiless gaze and her generous heart … Suite Française may take the crown, but her other works confirm that she was not simply the chronicler of June 1940, but a writer with a very broad canvas who has finally found her place in the history of literature."
–Lire
"A novelist of the very first order, perceptive to a fault and sly in her emotional restraint."
–Evening Standard
See all Editorial Reviews
David Golder, the brief account of a Jewish migrant's last and troubled days, was published in 1929. Anecdotal, it dwells on incidental encounters and reflections: conversations with his predatory, adulterous wife, her longtime lover, his fickle, pleasure-loving daughter, a business partner; a tour of the Jewish quarter with an old mate; a trip to his origins which, in a style reminiscent of the mature Némirovsky, ends in a moving portrayal of a final, unrecognised friendship and the picture of another hapless migrant's voyage.
The novel opens in the manner of a thriller, with a suicide offstage. At times it reads like a film script, at others it employs a collagist technique: fragments of satire and gossip, discussions of big business, streams of consciousness which are a confluence of past and present. Its pace is swift, its atmosphere claustrophobic. Though it occasionally shifts perspective from Golder's monologues to a camera's eye view of his wife and daughter and their affairs, its relentless focus is on the revelation of his inner demons.
David, ruthless, venal and ultimately pitiable, dominates the book; its other characters are at best projections of his needs, fears and desires. Possibly the shortcomings of a writer as yet immature, they also bear witness to her unsentimental understanding of the scars of emotional and physical dispossession.
Superficially, David's character bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Daphne du Maurier's monstrous Julius Levi in The Progress of Julius. Both Golder and Levi are Jewish migrants who have fought their way out of adversity; both, paranoid and vulnerable, are obsessed with beautiful, flighty daughters, but with very different outcomes. It's tempting to imagine du Maurier, a frequent visitor to France, reading Némirovsky on holiday and unconsciously appropriating some elements of her work.
Du Maurier's Julius remains a parodic representation of a Jewish parvenu. Némirovsky, however, writing closer to her own preoccupations, strips away Golder's mask, flesh and skin, to reveal the skull of a man damaged by history, prejudice and the failure of love.
In much of her work, Némirovsky's view of the roots her family outgrew is at best cold-eyed and at worst disdainful. It is also self-revealing, and a testament to her refusal to discard any part of her heritage. Francophone, exiled and reassimilated, she continued, in her fiction, to return to the collective past. In this early novel are flashes of the piercin --The Independent --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Review
Praise for the first edition of David Golder:
"The work of a woman who has the strength of one of the masters like Balzac or Dostoyevsky"
–New York Times, 1930
"All Némirovsky’s talent is apparent in her first novel: her pitiless gaze and her generous heart … Suite Française may take the crown, but her other works confirm that she was not simply the chronicler of June 1940, but a writer with a very broad canvas who has finally found her place in the history of literature."
–Lire
"A novelist of the very first order, perceptive to a fault and sly in her emotional restraint."
–Evening Standard
See all Editorial Reviews
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