Olivier Philipponnat

A very competent biography, and a very sad life. From a privileged upbringing in Ukraine- daughter of a Jewish financier and his shallow, faithless wife (the author detested her mother - her eponymous David Golder and his wife are modelled very much on her parents), life went slowly downhill. War, anti-Jewish pogroms, poverty...the family move abroad, and the author marries and becomes a celebrated writer in France, her books bestsellers and adapted for stage and screen.
There is quite a lot on the publishing world and French writers of the era.
And then comes Nazi occupation, the erosion of any Jewish liberties and the collusion of the French with the anti-semitism enjoined upon them. Nemirovsky feels the noose tightening and makes plans for her children, before, as she foresees, she is sent to Auschwitz...
The tremendous gloom and tension of the final chapters is palpable.
Very well written and informative.… (mehr)

This is the French original whose English translation was published last week as I believe.

From this book, it seems as though 'Le vin du solitude' is highly autobiographical, certainly with regard to Nemirovsky’s childhood and her relationship with her mother. I’m not sure that we really get an idea of what she was like–that may be inevitable with a biography of a writer, where we already seem to know more about the subject than any biography could tell us–and some events in her life happen offstage, presumably in the absence of any reliable evidence. For instance, one moment she’s studying Russian and comparative literature at the Sorbonne while going out having a good time with her friends, while the next she’s married to Michel Epstein and engaged in producing oeuvres alimentaires to make ends meet. OK, so her father’s fortune had disappeared about the time of his death, so that explains something…

How she met Michel Epstein, what their marriage was like–we never really learn. Similarly, while she was determined to love her daughters in the way that she had never been loved herself, it appears that she wanted to have them educated by governesses, so that they (like her) would not have any schoolfriends–an irony that surely deserves some comment or explanation.

I also didn’t get an idea of what ways her books are like those of other French writers of her time, and in what way they differ from them. There are odd cases where we learn about the same topics being treated by other writers, but nothing systematic. The eternal undergraduate would be inclined to claim that the difference is that at the end of her freedom she was in the Burgundian countryside with no occupation other than writing Suite Francaise and no way of gaining control over her circumstances except by rising above them into objectivity.

We do learn a lot about how much she earned for what book when it was published by whom, and indeed the reason given for her never seeking to cross the line into Vichy France was that she depended on a 'mensualite' from her publishers in Paris. At the same time, her mother lasted out the war years in Nice with forged Latvian papers, which makes it sound as though survival was merely a matter of technique.

Irene Nemirovsky est bien plus preoccupee de litterature que de sauver sa peau, mais il se pourrait que cela revienne au meme car: ‘Ce qui demeure: 1) notre humble vie quotidienne; 2) l’art; 3) Dieu.’

(slighly more at http://wp.me/pBfTB-g5)… (mehr)