Source of book: I own this
This is the second of Nemirovsky’s novels that I have read - the other was her debut, David Golder.
Because her personal story is relevant to this book as well, here is the summary, largely borrowed from my previous post:
She was Jewish, born in what is now Ukraine, but then part of the Russian empire. When she was a teen, the family fled Russia ahead of the Bolsheviks, who were none too fond of either Jews or wealthy bankers. Eventually, the family settled in Paris.
Irene married Michael Epstein, another banker, and they had two daughters. She started writing at a young age, and by age 26 had won acclaim for David Golder, her first novel.
More success followed, but then catastrophe. She had always walked a bit of a fine line, having some of her works published by a far-right and antisemitic magazine, and cultivating relationships with people who were prejudiced against her ethnicity. She, like many other Jewish people in Europe over the centuries, formally converted to Catholicism in the 1930s.
Unfortunately, none of this saved her. She and her husband were denied French citizenship because they were Jewish, and they were left as essentially citizens of no place.
Since the Bolsheviks had taken over Russia and it was now the USSR, her family and many other Jews from the Eastern Bloc were unwelcome and unable to return. With France denying them citizenship, they had no civil rights anywhere.
After Hitler invaded France, and put the Vichy (puppet) government in place, the Jews were rounded up. Irene was arrested in front of her young daughters, on the grounds of being a “stateless person of Jewish descent,” and sent to Auschwitz, where she would die a month later.
If this sounds more than a little like what the ICE gestapo is doing to people of color here in the United States, you have been paying attention and know your history.
This is exactly the sort of shit that is being done by masked thugs under the Trump Regime, and the brutality is being carried out now, as it was then, against people denied citizenship because of the “rules” of the place they live, rules then and now which are deeply rooted in racism.
The devastating additional factor for me is that the very people who taught me my history - and read me books like The Hiding Place - are now cheering on the mass deportations. I simply cannot fathom how this happened. How do people just abandon their moral values like that?
Anyway, Nemirovsky’s story is tragic and horrifying and a reminder that we cannot allow ourselves to demonize people based on race or national origin. To do so is to lose our humanity and become lower than the beasts.
With all of Nemirovsky’s books, it is always difficult to be sure how much is autobiographical. She writes about the people she knows, and they find their way into her books.
In a way, David Golder is about people like her father: rich bankers and investors who lose the chance to actually live because of their relentless pursuit of money. But not just money. There is something of the thrill of gambling and the feeling of worth because of one’s skill.
This theme is developed in a slightly different direction in The Wine of Solitude, which is Nemirovsky’s most autobiographical novel, from what I can tell.
It involves a little girl who grows into a woman - a girl who greatly resembles Irene.
Helene’s memories start in Ukraine, where she lives with her often-absent gambler (and banker and businessman) father, Boris; her vain and cold mother, Bella; and her beloved governess, Mademoiselle Rose. Oh, and also her mother’s lover, Max, who she hates with a fury.
Between being raised by Rose and summers spent in Paris, Helene is fluent in French and in French culture - and indeed, Paris is where she wants to spend her life.
As World War One shudders to a close, Russia is embroiled in civil war. The family flees, dismissing Rose, who dies of something on the exposure/insanity/suicide spectrum - we never know all the details. But Max comes with them.
They settle in Finland, then eventually make their way to Paris.
There is a lot that goes on, of course, and a lot of growing for Helene. The book starts off very much from the perspective of a little girl, but as Helene grows, so does the perspective, so that it really does feel like a true coming of age.
I will say that this is not a particularly pleasant book. Nobody in it is particularly good, even Helene, who is at least a child who is much neglected by her parents. She is sympathetic at first, and retains some of that, but good lord the last third of the book is a trip.
I am not sure how much to reveal, other than to say that Helene as a teen takes revenge on her mother in a way that destroys the family, and almost destroys Helene. Her mother deserves it. Her father deserves it. And by everything that is holy, Max deserves a million times worse than he gets.
But it is at least a relief that Helene pulls herself back from the precipice rather than commit all the way.
It is hard to escape the feeling that this book is a hate letter to Nemirovsky’s mother. And if her mother was even half as horrible as she is in the book, she deserved every bit of venom. Some people should not have children.
The thing is, though, Bella is thoroughly believable. She is recognizable. She is exactly the kind of woman who marries for money, spends it lavishly, devotes her life to preserving her youthful looks, and gets off on seducing younger men. Of course women like this see their children not merely as inconveniences, but as threats.
Men in general in this book do not look good. Boris is addicted to the adrenaline of gambling. He may be good at it, but it takes him away from his family. He is at best neglectful of Helene, being gone for months at a time, and seeing himself primarily as a paycheck.
Max is horrid too, in the way that young men (or women) who enjoy being kept by richer, older lovers tend to be. If only Helene would go away, then he and Bella wouldn’t have to sneak. And of course Helene knows anyway.
Max and Bella are a match, though, both of them shallow and selfish and petty. It’s life in the fast lane for them, and you know they are eventually going to crash. Maybe it isn’t just being rich that corrodes your soul, maybe just being around riches will do it. Either way, Helene’s hatred for both of them is perfectly understandable.
Later, in Finland, there is the young couple with kids, the husband of which (Fred) is both devoted and sleeping around all the time. His pursuit of the 14-year-old Helene is totally gross, and her naivety makes it all the worse. But it does give her the confidence to pursue her revenge.
I don’t want to create the idea this book is unpleasant. It’s actually a good bit of a page turner, and a compelling story. The characters may be unpleasant, but they are well drawn. They aren’t stick figure villains either, but just a certain kind of selfish, reckless, and casually cruel person that we all have met in real life.
One kind of feels that they would have been hangers-on at Epstein Island in our own day. Maybe not doing the rape thing, but drinking the booze and coke and ignoring the signs of worse.
The best part of the book, though, is Helene’s inner life. As the title suggests, she cherishes her solitude, her books, her thoughts, her intelligence, and her strength of mind. It is what saves her in a world where the adults don’t give a rat's ass about her needs.
And oh man are there so many cutting observations and witty asides. Helene, like the author, has a pretty serrated edge. Here are the ones I liked best.
The first comes very early in the book, when Boris is still working as an employee. His Jewishness (and his ability to prosper in his side hustles) leads to suspicion that his wife’s extravagance is due to his stealing, and a warning from his boss.
“He talked about your dresses, your trips abroad, which, according to him, I couldn’t possibly pay for on my salary. He told me that the money I had easy access to was a temptation he didn’t want to inflict on me. I asked him if a single penny had disappeared. ‘No,’ he said, but it was inevitable that one day it would, if your lifestyle didn’t change.”
This is a pretty good foreshadowing that Boris is never going to stop gambling, and Bella is never going to stop spending through their money.
Another zinger is a conversation between Helene and Rose.
“But Mama’s evil, isn’t she?”
“What an idea, Helene…She’s not evil; it’s just that she has always been spoiled - by her mother, then by your father, who loves her so much, and also spoiled by life. She has never had to work or give in to anyone.”
Oh boy, I certainly thought of someone with that line. Not my mom, who actually has worked from time to time, although life has spoiled her to a significant extent. Nope, it’s another family member who has never had to work, and never had to give in to anyone either. Carefully protected from anything that might challenge her ego. Yep, totally recognizable.
Here is a description that stood out to me:
In this peaceful town, where books and newspapers were always abandoned half-finished, where no one ever dared bring politics into the conversation, while private matters were as tranquil and harmless as the calm waters of a river, flowing peacefully from honest mediocrity to honest simplicity, where people gave their blessing to adultery so that time transformed love affairs into a second, honorable marriage respected by everyone, including the husband - in this world, human passions were hidden behind playing cards and bitterly disputed small winnings.
I also liked the pithy analysis of Fred:
He was one of those men who seem eternally young, who don’t know how to mature, but who will suddenly grow old, become bitter, spiteful, and tyrannical. But for now he was still young.
Ouch.
And another one that hit home for me, because it reflects my experience with my own mother.
To her, Helene would be a child until the day she died.
Regarding Max:
Men learn how to love, just as they learn everything, and the method they use never changes; it’s the same with every woman, in spite of themselves.
Regarding Boris’ living in delusion and denial, obviously aware his wife has a lover, but not acknowledging it to himself.
For a man needs a certain amount of breathable air, a small dose of oxygen and illusion in order to live.
A final bitter remark near the end of the book about Helene’s understanding of who her aging mother is:
She still had a good figure, attractive arms and shoulders, ‘a regal bearing’, a body maintained by lotions, massages, exercise, but, just as if someone had glued the head of a different woman on to a decapitated body, above her beautiful, white, plump shoulders rose the neck of a hag. It was on her neck that the forced slimming regimes took their toll; it consisted of a series of rolls of flesh, furrows, in which the strands of pearls sank. Her face bore the marks of all the beauty treatments that should have made it smoother and younger, but which had only succeeded in transforming it into a laboratory, a place to perform experiments. But most of all, what no amount of makeup could hide was the soul of this woman who Helene knew could be egotistical, harsh, and flawed, yet still human, capable of tenderness, if only towards Max, and which old age had turned to stone, transformed into a monster. Harshness and impatience were visible in her cold eyes, wide open between the little straight lines of her painted eyelashes; evil was obvious in her withered mouth; likes, duplicity, cruelty and cunning showed on her pale, tense, immobile face, even through its mask of make-up.
I find I enjoy Nemirovsky’s writing a great deal, including her willingness to refuse absolution for the dead, to insist that mistreatment is mistreatment, even from a parent.
It really is a shame that she was murdered before she turned 40, depriving the world of what could have been an important voice of the 20th Century.
I want to close with a bit of a word about the translation. Irene Nemirovsky gained some popularity in France during her lifetime, but her fame never really spread. The Wine of Solitude was published in 1935, but it wouldn’t be read by English readers until much later.
It was when Nemirovsky’s daughters realized that the notebooks they had preserved as they (aided by friends) fled France and avoided dying in the Holocaust, were not just personal diaries, but a nearly completed book, which would become Suite Francaise. When that book was published in 2004, it exploded onto the literary scene, eventually leading to the translation of many of Nemirovsky’s books into English and other languages.
The Wine of Solitude was published in English in 2011. You can find most of Nemirovsky’s books from Random House’s “Vintage International” line, translated by Sandra Smith. I find the translations to be unpretentious and smooth, although obviously I cannot read the originals to compare. Definitely worth seeking out, and easy to find both new and used.
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