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Il Vino Della Solitudine (1935)

by Irène Némirovsky(Favorite Author)

3.43 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

8845925668 (ISBN13: 9788845925665)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Adelphi

review 1: Irène Némirovsky is best known for Suite Francaise – her last novel, written just prior to her deportation to Auschwitz where she was killed in 1942. In The Wine of Solitude, Némirovsky gives a glimpse into an earlier period of her life. This autobiographical rendering is beautifully written and profoundly evocative of the time and place in which it is set. Told from the point of view of the young Hélène, the story begins in a small town in the Ukraine in the years before WW1. Hélène is eight years old. She loves her Jewish father but detests her mother, Bella, who shows her daughter no affection, too busy indulging her extra-marital affairs: "She nurtured in her heart a strange hatred of her that seemed to increase as she grew older; like love, there were a thous... moreand reasons for it and none; and like, love, there was the simple excuse: 'It is because of who she is, and who I am.'" Ten years later, Hélène has a vital awareness of her own ‘intoxicating power’ and realises that she can make her mother suffer in the way she has suffered. In the author’s own words, this is ‘the story of a little girl who loathes her mother’ and sets out to get revenge while, simultaneously searching for her freedom, which she finds in solitude, within herself. Easily read in a single sitting, this beautifully atmospheric and shockingly honest tale suggests that domestic turmoil can be just as destructive, on a personal level, as war.
review 2: The Wine of Solitude fashions a novel around the author’s early life (although told from “Helene” in the third person) in Kiev, Petersburg, a remote region in Finland and ultimately Paris. The panorama of historical events provides a fascinating backdrop to her experiences and those of her family. Although growing up with a rare abundance of material wealth, Helene had a horrible childhood and it was almost palpable to see the hardening of her heart as the book progressed.I could understand the author’s anger and hatred toward her neglectful and self centered mother, but what I found utterly confusing was that she adored her father who showed her no more attention and treated her no better than her mother. I absolutely loved this novel and it saddens me to think of how many more treasures she would have written had she not died so young. less

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