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.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

So, recently I've been reading or re-reading my way through a selection of past Booker Prize winners - yes, it's that time of year again, with this year's shortlist due to be announced on Tuesday 11th - and this past-winner caught my eye.

In part, I was intrigued by the wildly polarised array of reviews that this book has had; love it or hate it, marmite-style reviews. I also felt quite drawn to the promise of mysticism and a quote from a reviewer from The Times citing the novel as 'unlike anything you have ever read before', piqued my interest. The story of a spirit child born to live for just a short while but who decides to defy this destiny and stay in the living world; partly with a thirst to experience life and partly for the sake of his mother, sounded like a really interesting premise and refreshingly different from other novels I've read recently.

I wasn't disappointed.

'The Famished Road' won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1991 and I found it easy to see why. Ben Okri writes beautifully. His lyrical, poetic style is a delight to read. His use of language is at times literally breathtaking. As the reviewer for the Independent on Sunday wrote, 'Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence.' Although there is an abundance of mystical reflection in this novel, and it is by no means a page-turner in the conventional sense, I yet felt compelled to keep reading. Some greater force - the force of powerful language - was keeping me hungry for more.

The flowery writing and mystical narrative was at times a little frustrating. I found I was intensely interested in the child, Azaro, and his small family; their poverty-stricken life of hardships, hunger, sorrows and joy moved me. I wanted to know more about the flattening of the surrounding forest and its effect, and the building of new compounds, about the arrival of electricity, about the changing world around them and the infiltration of outside influences. I wanted to know more about the story of the photo-journalist who took photos of everyday life and hardships, tragedies and politicians - a documentary life of his neighbours if you like - and who had these controversial pictures published in the local press. I had to do a little digging of my own to discover that the novel is set in Nigeria as this is never overtly mentioned. All-in-all, beautiful as it is, I'm sure I would have fallen in love with the book if it had a more even balance of mystical and harsh gritty reality. The intense concentration on mysticism left me feeling one step removed from seeing the whole - the poverty, politics, daily grind, myth, legend and mysticism, all combined - and instead feeling like I had only truly grasped a part of the picture.

The beautiful writing makes this a worthy read for anyone who appreciates world-class use of language, but its ethereal qualities may put off readers looking for something more solid, rather than spiritual. If you do read and enjoy it I recommend going back and re-reading the last chapter every now and then - its message is universal.

A Life with Books by Julian Barnes

A review of Julian Barnes's short essay on books.
(Some of my own thoughts on printed books, bookshops and bookselling may just have crept in... a little...)

One of the little gems published especially for indie booksellers this Independent Booksellers Week 2012 is this short essay by Julian Barnes. It's a heartwarming piece from a world-renowned author about the indispensability of the physical book and how books have influenced his life: the nostalgia of inherited or prize-won volumes; the serendipity of discovery by browsing in bookshops, or the way in which he discovered books as a teenager by browsing his parents' and brother's bookshelves. I love these sentiments and agree wholeheartedly, as I do with Barnes's caveat that should the printed book survive and even flourish in the future then books and bookshops:

...'will have to earn their keep... Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside.' (pp.25-25).

This has never been more true. His own recent Man Booker Prize Winner 'The Sense of an Ending' was beautifully produced in hardback and the newly released paperback is also an attractive book with its' black edged pages. I expect sales of the paperback edition to flourish as well as the hardback did, and not just because of the content of the Booker Prize, but also because it is a physically attractive and pleasing book to pick up and read. So too, 'The Night Circus' by Erin Morgenstern; another well-made and attractively designed physical book which was set with a competitive recommended retail price and which sold well in hardback, with many customers commenting favourably about how lovely the book looked. As an indie bookseller I know I have to offer something over and above the online retail and the e-book experience so with both of these books I ensured a good stock of first edition copies and offered them on my shelves with dust jackets supplied by us in protective archival clear film - collectables of the future.

I am delighted that Julian Barnes retains an optimistic belief in the future of books and reading and hope very much that he is right. As a 30-something bookseller I have sampled e-readers, spend a large proportion of my working day online, use an iPad and so on. But, nothing will ever replace physical books for me. I can turn pages; feel the sentiment; remember people, places and things when I reach out for the books on my shelves; smell that glorious new book smell and that more time-worn old book smell; make notes easily; lend my favourite paperbacks to friends; I don't have to plug my books in to recharge them; they don't break; they are a pleasure to browse on my shelves; picture books given to children can be romped around with, loved, cuddled up with, dropped on the floor; I have books with treasured inscriptions from friends and family; more books with treasured signatures and inscriptions from authors; tatty books where just a glance takes me to where I was when I first encountered them; and ultimately when my bookshelves are positively groaning I can give away or sell on the books that no longer have meaning for me. Physical books open doors into my imagination, in a way that e-books have so far failed to do.

Julian Barnes's essay has also been published in the Guardian newspaper (Friday 29 June 2012) and is available to read online. If you would like a physical copy, it's available as a lovely little booklet with a striking cover design by Suzanne Dean, from independent bookshops only (it's not on Amazon - at least not at the moment). Priced £1.99. Proceeds from the sale of 'A Life with Books' will be donated to Freedom from Torture: The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.