David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky

I guess you've figured out by now that I am a great fan of Irene Nemirovsky's.  Her books never cease to amaze me. She says so much with so few words. All the novelas in this book are dark and seem to have no message other than darkness. That is until I finish each one and have time to process the story. That darn message sneaks up on me every time, giving me that lightbulb moment! Nemirovsky was/is a powerful writer. It makes what happened to her even more ironic and tragic. 

David Golder is the novel that established Nemirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of a self-made business man, once wealthy, now suffering a breakdown as he nears the lonely end of his life.

The Courilof Affair tells the story of a Russian revolutionary living out his last days and his recollections of his first infamous assassination.

Also included are two short, gemlike novels: The Ball, a pointed exploration of adolescence and the obsession with status among the bourgeoisie, and Snow in Autumn, an evocative tale of White Russian Immigrants in Paris after the Russian Revolution.

Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a wealthy banking family and emigrated to France during the Russian Revolution. After attending the Sorbonne in Paris she began to write and swiftly achieved success with David Golder, which was followed by more than a dozen other books. Throughout her lifetime she published widely in French newspapers and literary journals. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. More than sixty years later, Suite Francaise was published posthumously, for the first time, in 2006"......goodreads.com