Since the posthumous publication of Suite Française, many more of Irène Némirovsky's works have been translated and re-translated, none more autobiographical than The Wine of Solitude, a fiercely brave and angry little book, brutally unsentimental, stripped of domestic fantasy.
Hélène is an eight-year-old who scorns kissing and affection and is determined to be happy, shuttled about from the sleepy provincial Russian town where the tale begins to St. Petersburg, Finland and Paris. She grows from an innocent who loves studying and books into a lovely teenager determined to punish her spoiled, self-indulgent mother for years of selfishness.
Practicing the kind of sexual cruelty explored in the classic Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Hélène sets out to rob her mother of her lovely young Max. Némirovsky's tributes to other greats of French literature are everywhere apparent, as she writes with the sparseness of de Maupassant and the audacious feminine wiles of Colette.
The characters are multidimensional and pathetically human, from Hélène's devoted grandfather--who squanders three fortunes--and her prophetically sad grandmother, weeping as she does the household chores, to the doomed young governess, Mademoiselle Rose, and Max, tricked into giving his heart to his mistress's daughter. They exist, all of them, in a world of wealth and privilege, untroubled by "the sad sound of soldiers marching toward death."
It's the birth of a writer, shaped by war and revolution, told with the devastating cynicism of a young woman in a corrupt and greedy social world, where mothers openly flaunt their lovers and children are humored and ignored. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle