Andre Makine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 when he was thirty has been compared to Nabokov, Pasternak, and Proust. The author is a gifted story-teller with "Confessions" filled with skillfully-woven vignettes that provide a bitter-sweet view of Russian life. The book revolves around two friends and virtual brothers, Arkady and Alyosha, young pioneers in Stalin's postwar world. "Confessions" tells of the lives of their two families, those of Yakov Zinger - Arkady's father, and Pyotr Yevdokimov, father to Alyosha. There is adventure in Pyotr's skill as a sniper behind German lines in World War II, horror in the story of Svetlana, the "merry spinster" amidst survival during the Siege. There are magical scenes of Russian life and a most enjoyable vignette that revolved around the arrival of propaganda cinema presenting "The Threat of Atomic War", tirades against the "filthy American swine" and the bombing of Hiroshima and the exhortation from Russian authorities to build shelters. There is humor with Arkady on the drums and Alyosha on the trumpet bleating their protest against the apparitchik visitors from the Party but more singing out in the name of their Courtyard of families and friends, singing "in the name of the silence of our mothers". Alyosha is a fallen standard-bearer. Makine structures the book with Alyosha as narrator addressing his remembrances of their families' lives to his friend. In the end, Makine imparts a heaviness of heart with disillusionment with the Soviet dreams of Great Victory and a feeling of emptiness that the West (neither of Paris, nor of the States) has not been able to fill.

Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer is a beautiful book. The story involves two families, that of Yakov Zinger and Pyotr Yevdokimov. The story is told in the form of a memoir of their youth written by Pyotr's son Alyosha to Yakov's son Arkady. The story unfolds slowly. On the surface the memoirs invoke memories of the children's summers in their village. They were young pioneers filled (apparently) with a belief in the inevitable victory of socialism. As the name of this novel implies they were the standard-bearers of socialist youth marching towards the 'radiant horizon'. However, flowing beneath the beautiful words evoking their idyllic summers is the undertone of tragedy that envelops each of the families' pasts. Those tragedies are slowly and inexorably revealed. Pyotr, a sniper operating behind German lines during the Second World War lost both limbs at the hands of an "unfortunate artillery mistake' by his own troops. Yakov survived a German prison camp in Poland by surrounding himself with a mountain of dead and frozen bodies. Their wives tragic pasts are also slowly revealed. One survived the siege of Leningrad and witnessed unspeakable horrors in the process. The other lost her parents to Stalin's purges and spent her youth in an orphanage for children of those purges. As these stories are revealed the boys' otherwise inexplicable actions leading up to their confrontation with their Pioneer group leaders becomes slightly more understandable. I cannot convey the beauty of this book in adequate terms. Its power lies in the contrast between the beauty and power of Makine's writing about village life through the eyes of innocent children and the stark but unexpressed horror that percolates through the lives of these two families. This unstated horror serves as the thematic counterpoint to the rather unremarkable events that form the core of the narrative. This was a book worth reading.

It is always difficult to say what Andrei Makine's books are about. One could describe the plot or the story-line and feel that one hasn't said anything at all. Makine's novels are like all great works of art. They set up a resonance inside us that is intensely pleasureable and also painful. In Requiem, as in his other novels, Makine's prose is poetic and technically flawless, the historical content is fascinating and his irony and humor elicit a warm rush of recognition and laughter. Like all great art, it also makes us painfully aware of what is unexpressed in us.

If one can say that Dreams of My Russian Summers is "about" the birth of a writer, then Requiem for a Lost Empire is about the struggle to tell or speak the truth. There is a silence that bounds this struggle. The three generations of men in this novel live with the women they love largely in silence. One of the women even has her tongue cut out. Yet somehow, this silence is a state of grace. Most of the time we live in the contiuum between, caught between our superstitious fear of naming things and our compulsion to do so. Makine's efforts to tell the truth, whatever level of truth one wishes to draw from his writing, have produced an exquisitely beautiful and haunting novel.

Andrei Makine adds another laurel to his impressive writing career with the release of Requiem for a Lost Empire. In this short book (250 pages) Makine surveys the past century of change in Russia from the fall of the Czars and the rise of the people, through Stalin and World War II, through the Cold War with its ominous KGB into today with the undercover lives of common men striving to retain the promises of Communism. Makine does this seemingly incredible feat through the eyes of one family - sons and fathers who lived through the various phases of critical change that Russia (empire, USSR, etc) has undergone. In nonlinear fashion he draws multifacted, complex characters with flashbacks and flashforwards in a way that makes this less a history book (though it is valuably one) than the novel it is. And as if that weren't enough, Makine writes with a grace and poetry that suffuse his tale with lasting visuals and ominous grit. That the author left Russia to live in France and has written all his books to date in Frence means that we are also experiencing the work of a master translator. This little book is a gripping masterwork - highly recommended reading.

Vers la fin de Le Testament Français, le narrateur racconte une conversation qu'il a eu avec un "nouveau russe", l'un de ceux qui ont profité de l'ouverture de l'ancien empire soviétique pour faire leurs fortunes. D'après ce nouveau russe, l'Europe est en decline et il faudra la sang des barbares--y compris les russes--pour la renouveller. Le narrateur (Makine lui-même) semble écarter cette thèse, apparemment sans se rendre compte que le livre qu'il est en train d'écrire, Le Testament Français, est en fait une pièce d'évidence vers la validation de cette thèse. Parce qu'il vous sera difficile de trouver aujourd'hui en France un livre avec une telle énergie et passion, un livre tout à fait dépourvu de l'indifferance et le desanchantement qui domine, d'une façon ou autre, la litterature Francais. Il est triste de le dire, mais les lettrés Français semblent être épuisés et ce sont les étrangères comme Makine--des étrangères qui se sont emparés de l'enorme potentiel du language et de la culture Français sans s'emparer pour autant de leur languidité actuelle--qui semblent être les seuls capables de renouveler la litterature francophone.

This is a book for anyone who wishes to escape from today's world - the world of September 11, of violence and ugliness - into another world, one of gentleness and discreet culture. In other words, you step into what our world used to be like. In Makine's autobiographical novel we move from Tsarist Russia to Stalinist Russia to Paris at the turn of the 20th Century, seeing it mostly through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy.
Makine's style is that of 19th century Russian and French novelists. This book is a delight!
Makine is without doubt a future Nobel Prize Winner!

Makine captures beautifully the solitary emptiness of the steppes and their harsh beauty... you can really feel the silence of the vast land, the chill of the wind, the warmth of his family's tiny appartment... even more important is his realistic and compelling portrayal of his struggle for identity, his desire to belong...

Makine is a Russian-born author, who sought asylum in France at the age of 30. He is the first novelist to have received France's prestigious Prix Medices and Prix Goncouert for the same book. His perfect mastery of the French language is rooted on lessons received from his grandmother, and when presenting his writngs to the editors in France he had to pretend they were translations from Russian.

The coming of age for three boys in a remote village in Siberia is the main event around which this novel is structured. The trio, handsome Alyosha (the narrator), lamed Utkin, and strong minded Samurai, are all products of a secluded, narrow minded environment, where the only future perspectives are to work in the logging industry, the gold mines, or as a guard at a nearby gulag. In this world of no changes, in a land where romantic love had no place, of long winters, of boredom and lack of passions, the coming of a series of Belmondo movies will fuel their imagination and search for the unknown. The boys become seduced, fascinated by everything these films represent, the Western world and culture, freedom, love for the sake of love, and the beautiful sexy women. The effect is so strong that each one of the boys will eventually live out their own Belmondian fantasy. Uktkin as a writer, Samurai as a guerilla fighter, and the writer in the film industry.

Skilfully constructed and elegantly written, flamboyant style, sophisticated prose, sometimes overly elaborated. The reader will sometimes feel intoxicated with the language; Makine's descriptions of Siberian winters are at the same time exceedingly touching and repetitive. With a sexual overture, Andrei Makine carries his novel with a passionate prose, dreamy eroticism and powerful images.

This novel carries a universal theme in a provincial setting. In its deep psychological context, there is also the sociological aspect. The fascination "development" will play over "backwards" societies, the migration from the later to the first, and the emotional consequences upon those who dare face the change.

I am glad I read this book. But it wasn't as good as I expected. Makine's style has been compared to Sallinger's in 'Catcher in the Rye', but it isn't as good. Maybe it just a different style of writting an essentially similar story. I thought that although it conveyed and inspired passion in the reader; it lost some of it's flair in attemtping to be too lingually impressive. The flowery, poetic language was a good way to tell this age-old boy growing into a man tale, but at times it was too flowery and too much. Being one who appreciates the use of crafty language (such as Ms. Virginia Woolf), although I was mildly impresseed, I was sometimes confused.

The story line itself is not unique. The enviroment the boys grow in is. This novel provided an inside look at what outsiders think to be a cold, angry, unlivable terrain-- Siberia. I was amazed at Makine's ability explain the beauty of such a place, and it interested me to envision one growing up there. He was able to make me feel like I was visiting this odd town- so that was cool. The story wasn't very moving, the characters weren't too connectable. It took a really long time to tell a really short story. I liked expanding my Russian experience, but I was lost at certain parts of this novel. Some instances seemed to drag and be over-done but I guess that is typical of the place where the boys lived. I enjoy many Russian novelists and might have been expecting a little too much with this work. Overall, I would read it again, but it wasn't one of my favorites.

Russian-born novelist Andrei Makine's romantic and Proustian autobiographical first novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, was quite appropriately written in French because its subject was largely the centuries-old love affair that Russians have had with French culture in all its forms. Set mostly in a grim, Stalinist Siberia, it charted a boy's intoxication with his grandmother's lustrous memories of turn-of-the-century Paris. That inheritance of lost treasures eventually caused him deep conflict, but Makine resolved it by becoming a writer.

And what a writer, even in translation. His prose in that book was a lavish, slow torrent, lush and haunting. Not surprisingly, Makine is the first novelist to have received France's prestigious Prix Medicis and Prix Goncourt for the same book.

His new novel, set in the 1960s, is equally as focused on dreams of glamor and glory contrasting with a dismal Siberian reality as crushingly onerous as the Soviet system that has planted prison camps there. And once again, it's aspects of French culture that come to symbolize everything fresh, exciting, and free that is missing in the narrator's life.

Reading this novel you enter a fascinating and quite alien world of snow, silence and history-as-nightmare, where blizzards cover towns with a weight that equals the burden of collectivization and the calamities of Russia's decades of devastation through Revolution, civil war, and war. In this setting, the brutal regularity of the winters is as heedlessly cruel as the inane Communist Party slogans and official optimism that ceaselessly forecast a glorious future proving the truth of Marxism- Leninism. But what about the barren here-and-now?

The handsome narrator Dimitri (nicknamed Don Juan) and his two eenaged friends struggle with all the familiar burdens of adolescence. Not surprisingly, Dimitri's first sexual encounter, with a prostitute whose life also affects his two friends, doesn't reveal the glories of love, but grotesque chagrin l'amour instead. It's Makine's rich prose that makes something original out of all the cliched inchoate longings for life, experience, certainty and identity. His prose--and the bitter, empty life in Dimitri's eastern Siberian town where people feel "condemned to this natural beauty, and to the suffering that it conceals."

Into that void shines an unexpected beam of light far grander than the Trans-Siberian Railway and its mysterious, magnetic passengers glimpsed through windows. Quixotically, the local cinema starts showing an adventure film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and everyone for miles around starts lining up to see this movie not once, but dozens of times. In its chic, humor, and self-reflectiveness, the film offers unimaginable gifts to its Siberian audience. They see the unknown West there: excitement, sensuality, freedom, adventure, wit and sparkling fun. Belmondo's gorgeous smile on the movie poser undercuts years of fear and oppression under the Soviet system. And each of the trio of boys ironically finds deep lessons in the frivolous movie, identifying with different aspects of Belmondo's character: Lover, Warrior, and Poet.

Though the book is touchingly beautiful, it doesn't have quite the weight of Dreams of My Russian Summers, perhaps because there's no central figure who commands as much fascination as the grandmother there. You wonder if this book might not have made a better novella with some of the lushness trimmed away. At times the book's intoxication with language (which is its major strength), can even feel a bit exasperating. As H.G. Wells described Henry James's later style, you feel you're watching an elephant trying to pick up a pea.

But that's only an occasional problem. Most of the time you're happily, dreamily swept away, which is poetically appropriate. For the name of the Siberian river near Dimitri's town is Amur, also a Russian name for Cupid. And in French, the River Amur is spelled "Amour," which of course means love.

On the surface, this is a simple story of a Russian boy growing up in a fantasy world, the details of which are provided by his French grandmother Charlotte. With her sewing on her lap, she spins stories of her Parisian youth, triggered by photographs and newspaper cuttings kept in an an old 'Siberian' suitcase. As a child, he is fascinated by this vividly-remembered world, a misty Atlantis, but as the novel unfolds, we realise the narrator is on a self-imposed alchemical quest. His task is to rework these memories told as stories into a form that is acceptable as literature, with nods to Proust, Chekhov and Knut Hamsun. Indeed, in the final part of the book, he finds his work on sale in a bookshop. We first follow Charlotte's journey through snow and ice, storm and flood, revolution and rape, then the writer's attempts to capture this magic in words, and of course he realises that "the essential is unsayable" and yet "the unsayable is essential." However, via increasingly intense moments of wonder, or as James Joyce would say, epiphanies, he experiences, for example, a vivid street-scene in Paris in 1910, and 'becomes' the three women in an old photo. Each event in Charlotte's life - and consequently his own - is a moment in time which may be lost forever unless it is vividly recalled and told to another, just as was done in the ancient story-telling tradition, before writing arrived. Makine's attempt to show us that literature is "perpetual amazement" is a success; the prose is certainly haunting, even poetic in places. Although this is an excellent translation, I suspect that the French language of the original allows for many more nuances and subtleties of meaning. Yes, perhaps the plot's a little corny and we know sometimes what's around the corner, but the resonance of the characters, the spirit of place and the sense of time unfolding and looping (as in Charlotte's needle-work) more than compensates. But it is worth noting that audiences of old knew full well the beginning and end of the story they were being told; the value lay in the manner of the telling.

What is most magical about this book is the fact that it manages to maintain its magic -- just think about it, an English translation of a French rendition of Russian experiences! Mr. Makine manages to involve the reader in the confusion and bitter-sweet agony that an existence in multiple cultures and languages entails. He makes us truly feel Russia, Paris of the turn of the century, as well as the emotional responses that his heroes would have to the situations he puts them through. Reading this book is akin to having one of those vivid childhood experiences (the intensity of which we often try to recapture as grownups and invariably fail) as an adult.

Time alters all things. The resultant changes can be decay, or tedium/passe, or at the opposite end of the spectrum the changes can be enhancing as a patina on fine wood. Andrei Makine's DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS has happily acquired a literary patina that makes this brief but crystalline memoir of childhood even more of a joy to read after a few years on the shelf. Makine has the rare ability to weave wholly credible stories with unforgetable characters while at the same time measuring his prose like poetry. We are to suppose this is an autobiography, but it is far more than the journey of a nascent writer becoming a man. This is the essence of the Russian mind embellished by the great fortune of having early exposure to the beauty of France by means of recalling summers with Charlotte, a French born grandmother who nourishes the imagination and history of the writer to the point of delirium. All that has happened to and in Russia from the time of the Tsars to the present is presented in such a way that the grisly realities are always balanced by the homage to love of fatherland. Makine is a stunning writer and is still adding to our contemporary literature in ways that secure him a place among the geniuses of the word. Read and indulge your mind and your senses!

When someone recommended Makine I grabbed the "wrong" novel. I should have started with "Le Testement Francais". So I was told afterwards. But maybe the accident was a lucky one because now I've read one brilliant novel by Makine and I've got another waiting on my bookself.

Adolescent memories and longing of western world are so extraordinarily described in this Sibirian novel that even one's own memories would be much more ordinary, there are, however something familiar in them. The severe weather conditions, the schoolboys' confusion about raising sexuality, the western movies with one above all filmstar Belmondo make the reading experience enjoyable. If you want to read about French movies (starring Belmondo) without a single title being mentioned you should read this novel. Among other reasons.

There is absolutely nothing to recommend in this book to other readers. The only reason I finished the work was that I had no other reading alternative one evening, and I will not comment on a book I have not finished.

A Russian Princess refugee circa the 1940's is the center of this poorly conceived yarn. As a theme Russian Princesses both real and imagined, has been used as repetitiously as any other that readily comes to mind. Readers have been offered not only novels, but have also been presented with a variety of works that promoted pretenders to the Romanov Family. So what is an Author to do when faced with an overly worn theme? Make the son a hemophiliac so that anyone that knows a bit of History would think this was yet another fictional tale of the lost Romanovs.

Now that a familiar theme is established, a well-worn format follows. The tale opens with the end, and then we are subjected to a book filled with repetitive prose until we are rewarded with a vacuous ending. Prior to the story being mercifully brought to a conclusion, the reader is faced with page after page, and chapter after chapter of descriptions of various levels of incest that are so alike, you may wonder if you have read the same passage more than once.

I understand that the book was translated from French into English. This cannot mitigate any of this books deficiencies. French is not a long lost language. Had the original been an ancient language, which was subject to widely differing interpretations, this could have been a difficulty. However this is not the case.

The weakest part of this collection of words is the Author's attempt to rationalize the incestuous relationship. Once the Author chose such a volatile topic, that many consider well beyond the prurient, he set himself a great task. Since I do not believe his goal was to create just another controversial take on incest, the other alternative was to persuade the reader with circumstances that could mitigate the issue.

The Author did not succeed in telling an interesting story, nor was he able to cleverly rethink a human relationship that most would condemn.

This is not worth reading.

Makine is an extraordinary writer with many wonderful gifts and great accomplishments. In this book, however, the gifts seem to be wasted--or at least used for dubious effect. The tale of Olga Arbyelina is beautifully crafted and presented, but the actions which give impetus to the story are repulsive--incest with her son, initially done while she was drugged and unconscious, but eventually continued, justified to herself, and even welcomed. Olga is only marginally a sympathetic character. She seems so sick and seems to learn so little that one wonders why this book was written. The universal themes one would expect to see used to try to justify the subject matter seem missing here, though Pauline Melville uses similar subject matter in The Ventriloquist's Tale to great and even positive effect. The denouement and Olga's madness seemed to me neither sad nor unexpected. Ultimately, I found myself wondering why the author chose to write this story, a romanticized, melodramatic, and unsatisfying journey into darkness.

This is a beautifully written book. Makine truly has a talent with language -- some passages are so poetic, it's hard to believe that one is reading prose. You have to read the book in increments and savor the scenes. The writing is often very challenging and the whole plot is intellectually stimulating. This is definitely not a book where the plot moves quickly and everything is apparent from the beginning. Although the novel contains several taboo topics (incest, abortion, politics), it is possible to identify oneself with Olga. Makine's meticulous descriptions and his ability to communicate Olga's feelings has made this book a joy to read.

I have somewhat of a penchant for short novels. There is something rather delightful about a hardback novel of 100 pages or so. So slight, and yet so solid and real.

To read a book in one sitting is another delight. An hour or two spent with the book in your hands, a temporary escape.

There have been a few books this year that have wonderfully filled the above criteria, most notably Embers by Sandor Marai, and I was hoping that Makine's latest novel would be another. However, I was very disappointed.

The story begins with great promise but the narration is stilted and fragmentary, requiring the reader to check back to make sure a key plot point has not been missed. Usually it hasn't, it is just that Makine's style is to jump cut from scene to scene, often neglecting to take the reader with him.

Don't bother with this. Go for Embers instead.

Our narrator (name unknown) is waiting in a snowbound train station in the Urals when he encounters a peculiar man silently running his hands over the keys of the grand piano upstairs. The next morning, on the train together, he learns the man's name -- Alexei Berg -- and his story. When Alexei was young and living in Moscow, he was on his way to becoming a classical pianist. And he was engaged to be married. But on May 22, 1941, two days before his first solo concert, he was on his way home to his parents' apartment when a neighbor hurried past warning him not to go back. The secret police had come. And so he fled. After his fiance's family betrayed him, he took the identity of a dead Russian soldier and spend years fighting in the Soviet army. He was befriended by a General, taunted by his daughter, cast adrift without name or family ... but he has never forgotten his music.

Despite a very real poignancy, MUSIC OF A LIFE is far too short (109 pages) and undeveloped to be a truly satisfying novel. As I read I kept thinking that if Makine had spent more time on his plot and allowed it room to grow, the story could have been a winner. All the necessary elements -- danger, love, loss and rediscovery -- are present. Yet they're crammed into a few spare paragraphs and the reader is mostly told things, not shown them, between great jumps in time and place. Makine has obvious talent for description, for picking out the forgotten snapshots of life and portraying them as something strangely beautiful, but in this effort at least he lacks the ability to create an impression strong enough to last.

I wish I could recommend this little book because I really wanted to like it, but in truth I found MUSIC OF A LIFE only a rough draft, not a finished symphony, and so I can't.

This novel is lyrical, wonderully written, economical with language, and deeply emotional. In this age where post-modern writers craft 700 page monsters that are in dire need of editing (of course there are wonderful novels this size, but mostly written before 1970), here is an intimate tale that is excatly as long as the story requires. With all due respect to the two reviews below--ignore them and you won't be sorry. Their criticism reminds me of Salieri's critique of Mozart's work in Amadeus--"sire, there are too many notes"--to which the proper response here is the same--"too many, there are just the right amount". The writing here is wonderful, straightforward and most of all, lacking attitude and artifice (for another writer similarly talented, try Ha Jin). Buy it.