The Wine of Solitude - Hardcover

Némirovsky, Irčne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701185570 ISBN 13: 9780701185572

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2011

Synopsis

Introspective, intense and poignant, The Wine of Solitude is the most autobiographical of all Irčne Némirovsky's novels, now available in English for the first time.
Imbued with melancholy, and regret, it explores the troubled relationship between a young girl, her distant, self-absorbed mother and her mother's lover, Max. We follow the family through the Great War and the Russian Revolution, as the young Hélčne grows from a dreamy, unhappy child into an angry young woman.

Through hot summers in a fictionalised Kiev (Némirovsky's own birthplace) and the cruel winters of St Petersburg, the would-be writer Hélčne blossoms, despite her mother's neglect, into a clear-eyed observer of the life around her. The Wine of Solitude is a powerful tale, telling less of the end of innocence, than of disillusionment; the story of an upbringing that produces a young woman as hard as a diamond, prepared to wreak a shattering revenge on her mother.

About this title

About the Authors

Irčne Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, All Our Worldly Goods, The Dogs and the Wolves and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, such as the posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. She was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evęque (in German occupied territory). It was here that Irčne began writing Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

Sandra Smith is the translator of all 14 novels by Irčne Némirovsky available in English, a new translation of Camus's The Outsider; and The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir (Ecco Press, USA), among many others. Her translation of Nemirovsky's Suite Française won the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens won The National Jewish Book Award. She currently teaches at NYU.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701185570
• ISBN 13: 9780701185572
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256