Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Each summer, Andrei Makine's narrator and his sister leave the Soviet Union for the mythical land of France-Atlantis. That this country is a beautiful confabulation, a consolation existing only in his maternal grandmother's mind, makes it no less real. Though Charlotte Lemonnier lives in a town on the edge of the steppe, each night she journeys to a long-ago Paris, telling tales that the children then translate with their more Russian minds: "The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion--that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm ..."
Makine's first novel is a singing tribute to the alchemy of inspiration, but it is no less familiar with the sorrows of reality. And it is only as he gets older that the narrator begins to piece together his grandmother's far more tragic past--her experiences in the Great War, the October Revolution, and after. Dreams of My Russian Summers is a love letter to an extraordinary woman (it's hard not to see the book as autobiographical) as well as to language and literature, which the boy turns to in avoidance of history's manipulations. It has all the marks of an instant classic.
From Library Journal
The first of Makine's four novels to appear in English, this autobiographical novel won the 1995 Prix Medicis for Best Foreign Fiction as well as France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, never before awarded to a non-Frenchman. Its coming-of-age story describes young Andrei's summers with his French grandmother Charlotte in the remote Russian village of Saranza. She came to Russia as a Red Cross nurse during World War I and fell in love with a Russian lawyer who went off to the front and later died a premature death from his war wounds. Charlotte and Andrei spend many summer evenings sharing her memories of turn-of-the-century Paris. As the adolescent Andrei struggles with his identity?is he Russian or French?he discovers that it was possible for Charlotte to live in such a foreign land and retain her "Frenchness" because of her love for her husband. Andrei finally reconciles these contrasting facets of his identity and eventually emigrates to France. Makine has fashioned a deeply felt, lyrically told tale. For all general library collections.?Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Winner of numerous accolades in Europe, Makine's lyrical, richly textured novel will surely be welcomed with similar enthusiasm once discovered by the literati at large on this side of the Atlantic. Melding the powerful beauty of earlier Russian writing with an extraordinarily au courant sensibility, Makine renders with hypnotic grace the young protagonist Andrei's pivotal summer visits to his grandmother's Siberian home bordering the Russian steppe and the other life Andrei lives away from that region of dreamlike existence. Makine's storytelling abilities are as exhilaratingly intricate and mesmerizing as those of grandmother Charlotte, who journeyed far from her birthplace in France to marry a Russian husband. It falls to the boy, Andrei, as he comes of age, to reconcile disparate threads--of adult conversations overheard and mysterious family photos with a storehouse of conjured images. And, finally, he must integrate the French and Russian facets of his own being. Lovers of fine literature will relish the stunningly perfect prose with which Makine achieves young Andrei's transformative experiences. Alice Joyce
From Kirkus Reviews
A mesmerizing celebration of the influence of memory and longing in shaping our imaginations and lives, by a Russian novelist of substantial power and originality. Makine's fourth novel (the first to be translated into English) has already received acclaim in France, where it won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Medicis. The story consists largely of the attempts of Andrei, a Russian migr in France, to set down his recollections of his beloved grandmother Charlotte. Born in France but raised largely in a small town in Siberia, Charlotte's life spans much of the century, from the years before the 1917 Revolution through her experience of the rise of the Communists and the horrors of the 1930s and WW II. A tough, complex, charming figure, she fascinates Andrei, who spends the summers of his childhood and adolescence with her. She creates for him a vivid portrait of the ``France/Atlantis'' of her childhood, a world far more elegant, carefree, and stimulating than Russia in the 1970s and '80s. Her warm, artful memories of her homeland and of books (``It was,'' he says, ``indeed essentially a bookish country, a country composed of words'') captivate Andrei. Makine's portrait of the manner in which the romantic Andrei becomes, as a result of his absorption in this other world, an outsider in Russia, and eventually a restless traveler around Europe, is exact and convincing. Not surprisingly, he ends up in France, where he attempts, through ``the silent work of memory,'' to come to grips with the exact nature of his inheritance. It is only through art, Makine suggests, that we can escape the allure of the past, by transmuting it into something that has ``the reality, discreet and spontaneous, of life itself.'' By no means the least pleasure here is Makine's voice: reflective, sensuous, frank. A superb exploration of the sustaining power of memory, and one of the most distinctive novels of the season. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
If the epic background of war and revolution brings Pasternak to mind, it is also true that Proust's esthetic quest in search of a timeless time can be perceived subtly woven into these pages. Andrei Makine has given us a major novel. -- The New York Times Book Review, Victor Brombert
Makine's novel reminds us how, through a precise use of language, it is possible to call back the past. By trusting in his ability to render truthfully the oddness of his story, the peculiar treasured details--ordinary pebbles individually wrapped in tissue paper--Makine allows himself and his readers to be possessed by the singular hallmark of greatness in literature (in a paraphrase of Osip Mandelstam): the desire to be astonished by his own words. Dreams of My Russian Summers is one of the great autobiographical novels of this century. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Thomas McGonigle
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Product details
Publisher : Arcade Publishing (August 22, 1997)
Language : English
Hardcover : 241 pages
ISBN-10 : 1559703830
ISBN-13 : 978-1559703833
Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
Dimensions : 6.5 x 0.88 x 9.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,399,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#859 in French Literature (Books)
#18,796 in Police Procedurals (Books)
#63,268 in Literary Fiction (Books)
Customer Reviews: 3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 275 ratings
