Introspective and poignant, The Wine of Solitude is the most autobiographical of all of the novels from the celebrated author of Suite Française. Beginning in a fictionalized Kiev, The Wine of Solitude follows the Karol family through the Great War and the Russian Revolution, as the young Hélène grows from a dreamy, unhappy child into a strongwilled young woman. From the hot Kiev summers to the … From the hot Kiev summers to the cruel winters of St Petersburg and eventually to springtime in Paris, the would-be writer Hélène blossoms, despite her mother’s neglect, into a clear-eyed observer of the life around her. Here is a powerful tale of disillusionment — the story of an upbringing that produces a young woman as hard as a diamond, prepared to wreak a shattering revenge on her mother.
A Vintage Paperback Original
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Irène Némirovsky has long been one of my favorite authors and now I can proudly say that I’ve read all of her books. If you’re somewhat familiar with her biography, you’ll know that she had an extremely difficult relationship with her mother, and this reflects in many of her novels, such as “David Golder” and “Jezebel.” Out of all of them, “Wine of Solitude” is perhaps the most autobiographical and personal, and I believe no reader will be able to read it without being affected by it in the most profound way. Little Hèléne’s story touched me to the core and awoke a whole range of different emotions in me, starting with sadness, melancholy, and anguish, and ending with growing resentment, anger, and outright desire for revenge. Némirovsky’s portrayal of her fictional dysfunctional family is brilliant: her mother – a spoiled, capricious woman who makes her husband obey her every whim and ignores her little daughter almost entirely; the husband, who, in his pursuit of money, is constantly absent and when he’s there, only talks about “gold mines, millions, investments, and more millions”; her mother’s lover, Max, who basically lives in the house now and poisons the atmosphere itself with his presence. And in the middle of all this mayhem, on the verge of the Revolution, little Hèléne and her loyal governess Mademoiselle Rose are thrown like waves against the rocks when all both long for is a quiet harbor of normality.
The writing is outstanding, as always. The prose flows beautifully, with melancholy tenderness. The history of Russia in the early twentieth century comes alive with every page, and you’ll soon find yourselves completely immersed in a corrupted world of wealth, crumbling morals, and decadence. I always highly recommend her works, and this one is among the finest.
This is the second of the Némirovsky books I read on vacation, and although I ultimately preferred All Our Worldly Goods, I enjoyed the change of setting with this one. Unlike her other novels that I’ve read, The Wine of Solitude is not set (entirely) within France. The book begins in a small Ukrainian town (a fictionalized Kiev, according to the description on the book jacket), then winding through St. Petersburg, rural Finland, Helsinki, Nice, and finally Paris, it is the story of an unhappy White Russian family whose fortunes rise and fall like the world around them. Like Goods, this book covers a vast expanse of time (roughly 15 years) and weaves in the geopolitical situation with which Némirovsky herself was only too familiar. At their core, Némirovsky’s works seem to revolve around a few central relationships, and Wine is no different. It is an intricately spun coming-of-age story of a mother and her daughter, a daughter and her father, the daughter and the governess, and how love, anger, jealousy, and hatred make and undermine a family. World war, revolution, and depression are the backdrop against which decisions are made, but Némirovsky gives us protagonists whose characters seemed forged (of iron) almost independently of the events around them.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2012/12/vacation-reading.html)