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  • Book Review
  • The Wine of Solitude - Irène Némirovsky (Translated by Sandra Smith)



    Published by Chatto & Windus
    ISBN: 978-0-701-18557-2

    I came to this book via my book-club, we were asked by Book Time magazine to review it which means getting a brand new, un-touched copy of the book and as I’ve mentioned before new books are one of my favourite things.

    This is a much lighter novel than the harrowing ‘Suite Française. It is almost reminiscent of a Nancy Mitford novel; the war is background noise, Némirovsky writes beautiful fulsome descriptions of nature and the weather, rather than details about the war. It is the story of a child growing into a woman in a very difficult time and within the confines of a dysfunctional family.

    This book is supposedly the most autobiographical of all Némirovsky’s novels. Irène Némirovsky did not get along with her mother, Fanny, who sat out the war in safety in Vichy France and when Némirovsky was taken to Auschwitz and killed in 1942 Fanny refused to take on her grand-daughters.

    The story is built around Hélène Karol who lives in the Ukraine with her parents, grandparents and a French governess at the outbreak of the first world war. Her mother Belle is a vain, self absorbed woman with no maternal instincts what-so-ever. Belle’s father had spent three fortunes and had no dowry for Belle so she’d married Boris Karol, a Jew with a gambling addiction but who loves her with a self delusional obsession, willing to forgive her for her infidelities and the squandering of his money. He will not even listen to his daughter when she tries to warn him of Bella’s exploits.

    There is no love lost between Belle and her parents, she lets them know at every opportunity that she has saved them all from poverty via her advantageous marriage, but she likes to remind Boris that she was a Safronov so could have married into any high class family and she tells anyone who will listen what a disappointment Hélène is to her. She loves the attention her lovers pay her and the ensuing passionate scenes between her and Boris when he suspects yet another infidelity. This is a woman who is hated by other women and has no real friends.

    Hélène goes to bed each night with her parents arguments ringing in her ears, she is almost blasé about the histrionics that her mother can turn on when convincing Boris that she is not having an affair and cannot understand why grown-ups want to kiss and whisper to one another, she’d rather run around, climb things and play at war with her friends. The only constant in her life is the Parisian governess Mademoiselle Rose and Bella realises that the only way to get a reaction out of Hélène is to threaten to remove Mademoiselle Rose whenever Hélène misbehaves.

    When Bella embarks on an affair with Max, a distant, young relative the young Hélène realises the situation and makes it her life’s mission to extract a cruel revenge on her mother and Max, not caring that she could destroy the lives of everyone around her.
    Reviewed by Dianne Blashill
    dmblashill@hotmail.co.uk



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