The Wine of Solitude by Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky's works blasted into the current public eye with the publication in 2004 (subsequent media spotlight with the English translation making its way into paperback, with Vintage in 2007) of Suite française, a planned sequence of five novels portraying life in France after the occupation began in 1940. The sequence was cut short. Irène had completed just the first two novels in the sequence when, in July 1942, she was arrested as a Jew and subsequently sent to Auschwitz, where she died. The notebook containing the novels survived in her daughter's possession but wasn't read until 1998, when her daughter, Denise, first took a look at it. Since the great success of Suite française, a number of Irène's earlier novels have since been translated into English and have become available to a wider audience. Le vin de solitude is the latest of these to have been published in English, with the Vintage paperback having just been released (6 September, 2012).

The novel begins in a shabby apartment in a provincial town in the Ukraine ...'The silence of this sleepy provincial town, lost deep within Russia, was intense, heavy and overwhelmingly sad.' Eight-year-old Hélène sits at the dinner table with her mother, father, grandparents and French governess, Mademoiselle Rose. Devoid of affection from her mother, indifferent to the affections of her grandparents, Hélène has only eyes for her beloved Papa, who rarely makes the time to notice her, and her practical and caring Mademoiselle Rose. In this environment young Hélène's distance from her mother begins its descent to hatred, fuelled by her mother's love affairs, her treatment of her papa, her coldness towards her daughter and treatment of Mlle Rose.

As the family's fortunes change, papa Boris moves them first to St. Petersburg, leaving Hélène's grandparents behind and taking with them Max, Hélène's cousin and Bella's lover; subsequently, the Russian Revolution leads Boris and Bella to hide money and share certificates in every available piece of furniture, stuffing notes into sofas for safekeeping. Hélène sadly watches the Revolution go on around them from her privileged position, despondent at her parents ignorance of the hardships surrounding them. The Revolution then leads them to flee first to the Finnish borders, and then to Helsinki; later, after the War's end, to Paris. Hélène's teenage years are spent mostly in isolation, against this backdrop of war and upheaval, changing fortunes, lies and deceit. She grows up devoid of affection, falls into an innocent, brief affair with a married man and hatches a plot to wreak revenge on her mother. In all, we see her emerge into a hard and bitter young woman; her redeeming features being her determination to turn out differently and not succumb to the same path as her mother. It's not difficult to empathise with this bitter, young Hélène as what else has she known?

A number of Irène Némirovsky's novels carry this theme of mother-daughter estrangement and the rebellious daughter, and The Wine of Solitude is believed to be the most autobiographical of these - the fleeing from the Russian Empire, the year spent in Finland, before settling in Paris. The denouement of the novel is perhaps more final than Irène's gradual estrangement from her mother (reference. Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works). It leaves the reader to wonder if this is the dramatic exit from her mother's life that Irene wishes she had taken.

It's a very well-executed novel, short on words but not lacking in description; fluidly written, evocative and shocking, and undeniably, a powerful coming-of-age story.