I've been relying on The Life of Irene Nemirovsky to place me in sleep mode lately. Not that it isn't fascinating to read the historical text because it most certainly is. Authors Olivier Philipponnot and Patrick Lienhart have performed an excellent job putting the life of the author into the perspective of the times. And, almost more than the trajectory of her life is reading about the state of Jewry in Ukraine and Russia and France of the time. The misery that I knew about in those lives has been etched in a way that convinces me and would any reader that however much I thought I knew, I hardly knew half of it.

As for Irene Nemirovsky herself, she had the good fortune to be born to a middle-class lifestyle aspiring to wealth. Her father did in fact achieve that goal. And she herself was witness to the Russian Revolution in full living colour of blood and tears. Like my own mother, whose father and brothers were involved in the White-Red ideological political struggle of the era, and who were killed when a bomb was tossed by the Whites into the home of known Red sympathizers. My mother and her older sister were merely wounded.

Irene Nemirovsky had no siblings. Her mother was not suited to motherhood and the child was given over to the care of nursemaids, then live-in tutors-cum-chaperones who remained with her throughout her growing years and into young adulthood. She was born in Kiev, described as a fabulous garden city of great beauty (who knew!), a vassal-state of Russia; actually indistinguishable as an autonomous region, but someone who adored Paris and the French language through exposure to both as a child when her parents spent idyllic (for her) summer months in the City of Light.

She detested her mother. For ignoring her young daughter's emotional needs, for despairing over her lost youth, as the mother of a growing girl, a vain and selfish woman who took serial lovers, betraying her husband's trust repeatedly. And this writer of fascinating prose who used her own experiences to model her well-received novels after, had the great misfortune to be living in Europe at a time when the Third Reich was flexing its muscles, and when European anti-Semitism was such a great aid in helping the Nazis prosecute their Final Solution.

Concurrently with reading about this historical event tracing a daughter's disgust and displeasure with her mother, the newspaper had a reminding report updating the case of a young girl of 12 from Alberta who had contrived to have her 23-year-old boyfriend murder her parents, while she herself killed her eight-year-old brother in revenge for her parents' intervention in her life, attempting to persuade her away from the 'Goth' friends she had made and her intimate relations with the young man.

The young man, of sub-grade intelligence, had been manipulated by the 12-year-old to do her bidding. At trial she portrayed herself as being under his control, when the absolute opposite represented reality. He is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, while she has just been released prematurely to her original ten-year sentence, the parole board giving her 'time off' for what the judge considered to be exemplary behaviour that would have made her parents proud. Would have made her parents proud? The psychopathic child they had borne, nourished and raised, conspiring successfully to deprive them of their lives, and deliberately, cruelly, killing her little brother?

I feel somewhat bothered by these portrayals of mother-daughter relationships. I do know that many such relationships are fraught. And I know personally what it is like to labour emotionally under these conditions. Instead of loving one another and valuing each other we tend -- or some among us  tend -- to view life together through a dark-coloured lens of vituperative malice. A condition that seems so utterly alien to that mother-daughter bond. A painfully excoriating experience.