A highly recommended novel: The Wine of Solitude by Irene Nemirovsky

This is a sad yet powerful autobiographical novel that traces with precision and beautiful imagery the early life of Helene Karol.

 It begins in the Ukraine when Helene is 8 and traces for a 13 year span her inner growth, as the family travels on the eve of  the Russian revolution (and World War I) first to St. Petersburg, then to Finland and finally Paris.

I had a read about a third of the novel and for some reason, probably due to its depressive scenes, put it down for 5 days. Then when I picked it up, I knew I had to finish it, drawn by the sensitivity and minute mosaic descriptions of people and feelings.

It is amazing that the young  Helene survives in such a dysfunctional family situation and miraculously writes so brilliantly.

Her mother ignores her as she carries on with Max her  live-in lover.

Her father, who is invested in stocks and other business ventures, is hardly ever around and dotes on his wife lavishly hardly aware of his wife's other life.

What seems to hold Helene's life together is the presence of her nanny Mademoiselle Rose who supplies her with the love, sympathy and compassion that is otherwise missing.

Somehow Helene is able to leave an abusive family environment to become a better person than either of her parents.

She does this by isolating herself and discovering an inner strength to overcome her pain and solitude.

As a teenager,  "She looked at the people around her. They didn't even see she was there, but to her as well they were unreal, distant, half-hidden in a mist: vain, insubstantial ghosts lacking flesh and blood; she lived on the sidelines, far away from them, in an imaginary world where she was mistress and queen."

Enjoy this novel, as it leaves not only a bitter aftertaste of a young wine, but also the body and full aroma of an aged vintage.

Irene Nemirovsky, who was deported to and died in a Nazi concentration camp, very much lives on