Rating: 
Summary: speak, memory
Review: A lovely, lyrical "autobiographical novel". Makine, born Russian, has lived in France since 1987. This novel covers his extraordinary relationship with his grandmother, who sets his life in motion by re-telling stories of her French past. This is a wonderful book, filled with spare, powerful writing. One of the loveliest books I've read in a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: Try something else
Review: A surprisingly large number of critics have compared this novel to Proust (though my copy has a reviewer compare it to "Doctor Zhivago). This can't help Makine's reputation, since it is very obvious that Makine is not in Proust's class. One is reminded of Sartre's comment that while Valery was a bourgeois, most bourgeois are not remotely like Valery. If Proust was a dandy, he was also infinitely more than that. He is also an intelligent and acute observer, a man of considerable wit and one of the finest writers of love in the last century. Makine is not really any of these.The Independent claimed that "We inhabit [he hero's] mind more intensely than any boy's mind since Marcel's in the Rembrance of Things Past." Clearly false in my opinion, and not simply because of the counterexamples of Call it Sleep, See Under Love, or The Time of the Hero or The Street of Crocodiles. Much of the book consists of the protagonist's obsessions with the stories related by his French grandmother about the idealized France of her youth at the beginning of the century. The only aspect of his childhood that is particularly well conveyed is the solipsistic intensity that he holds on to these memories. Other aspects of the child-like mind--the particularly acute observation, the intensity of new feelings, the special nature one attaches to certain objects or certain relationships--these are not well conveyed. Ok, so he's not Proust. Surely there are other virtues? But Dreams of My Russian Summers shows other problems. For a start, the main focus of the novel isn't the memories of the protagonist's (who is nicknamed once as Frantsuz), but those of his grandmother. The other relationships in his life are all curiously underplayed. There is a certain lack of reaction to the death of his two parents, a sister wanders out of the narrative never to be seen again, there are brief mentions of sexual interests as a teenager, but there is no systematic discussion of the Frantsuz's love or sexuality. Except for one relationship has with a fellow adolescent Frantsuz has gone through life without any deep emotional connections except to his maternal grandmother. The contrast with Marcel or Proust is rather striking. Moreover, when Frantsuz finally emigrates to his idealized Paris, there is surprisingly little discussion on what he actually thinks about it. Much of the book deals with his grandmother's life, and it contains the natural horrors of 20th century Russia. There is the agony of the second world war, there are a couple of specific Stalinist atrocities (Beria's raping of young women, the deportation of the dismembered from the streets of post-war Russia), naturally Frantsuz's grandfather suffers under the Purges, and his grandmother is the victim of a partiucularly unpleasant crime. But there is something missing in this, something original. A contrast with W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz is rather striking and to Makine's detriment, since Sebald uses a special style and has the real sense of memory and description that Makine only thinks he has. There is a certain tendency to use commonplaces about the essence of Russia: "an endless expanse yawning between this German city and Russia, asleep under the snows." (207) "Russia, like a bear after a long winter, was awaking within me. A pitiless, beautiful, absurd, unique Russia. A Russia pitted against the rest of the world by it somber destiny." (142) "Russia has no limits, neither in goodness nor in evil." (146) "...this immensity that stretches from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and which is known as the `steppe'..." These are not particularly thoughtful or original comments. (And there is a tendency to refer to Russia alone. What about the other fourteen Soviet republics?) We get typical touches about long suffering women and about Russian alcoholism. We get sententious pseudo-Proustian touches ("Time, endowed with a grinding irony, and which, by reason of its tricks and inconsistencies, is forever reminding us of its indifferent power.") There is a mildly amusing joke about how Frantsuz is unable to get his French books published in France, so he claims that his next French book is actually a translation from Russian. The final twist in the plot is extremely unconvincing, it raises all sorts of questions (such as why did Frantsuz's relatives act the way they did?), is morally pointless and morally underdeveloped, and seems only to offer a retrospective vindication to Frantsuz's conduct towards his family. Stalin and Brezhnev did almost infinite damage to Russian literature; but they can't be blamed for all of Makine's faults, and empty praise of him will not cure the suffering they caused.
Rating:
Summary: speak, memory
Review: A work of art, Makine's use of language is stunning. Not a quick read, I frequently had to stop and ponder many profound passages. Literature as an art form is not dead.
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical memories of idyllic summers past
Review: Andrei Makine, born in Siberia in 1957, has written an prose ode to his French grandmother, a memorable account of life in Communist Russia as lived by the woman who gave him joy, comfort, and permission to dream of other worlds.
Each summer, Andrei and his sister visited this grandmother at the edge of Russia's vast steppes, and in the evening she told them stories of her past. Trapped in Russia after the revolution, she married a Russian and became a hardworking Soviet wife and mother - but she never lost the Frenchness of her utmost being. Slowly, over the years, she reveals harsh truths to young Andrei - but always with a lyrical and dreamlike quality that makes reading this book feel as though you're inhaling pure, gauzy poetry.
Rating:
Summary: The Beautiful Fragility of a Reverie
Review: Andrei Makine, the author of the lyrically, poetically gorgeous book, Dreams of My Russian Summers has been compared to Nabokov, Chekhov and Proust. Although these comparisons are meant to be flattering, they are grossly unfair, for Makine is an extraordinarily talented writer; an original, comparable to none. The Russian summers of the title are those the narrator and his sister spent visiting their grandmother, Charlotte, in the town of Saranza on the eastern edge of the steppes. Charlotte was born in France in 1903 and was subsequently trapped in Russia in 1921 at the outbreak of the revolution. She has lived an outwardly harrowing life, surviving famine, civil war, a rape by a band of thieves in the desert as well as the seemingly endless cold and snows of the Siberian winter. When she finally marries a Russian soldier, he is twice reported dead at the Front and Charlotte escapes the German air raid with her two children, working as a nurse in army field hospitals. She is a woman who embraces the vastness of Russia, yet manages to keep her Frenchness alive. And it is this Frenchness, this essence of all things French, that she wishes to pass on to her grandchildren. Apparently she succeeds. Standing on Grandmother Charlotte's balcony, young Makine looks out over the steppes as he comes to believe that he has found the secret of "being French." He says, "The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole." He finds this elusive identity of the living whole in stark contrast to his native Russia and longs for France and its "well ordered mode of existence." Grandmother Charlotte's tales of her years in France are triggered by a suitcase full of crumbling family photos and yellowed newspaper clippings. Miraculously, this suitcase has survived the Russian Civil War, famines and purges, Stalin's prison camps and Hitler's invasion. These precious clippings and photos allow Charlotte's grandchildren to participate in the French joie de vivre and experience such things as the visit of Tsar Nicholas to France in 1896. As a child growing up under the regime of Leonid Brezhnev, Makine has trouble believing that the man described as the bloody butcher of the people actually shook hands with the President of the Republique Francais as the band played the Marseillaise. Grandmother Charlotte even remembers and can recite, the poem composed for the Tsar's visit, a poem that assured him he had earned "the love of a free people." Even more unbelievable to young Makine is his grandmother's revelation that only a few years after the visit from Tsar Nicholas, this very same President of France died of a heart attack in the arms of his beautiful mistress. His grandmother's childhood discovery of a plaque in a Paris alleyway proves to be prophetic. This plaque commemorates the spot where, in 1407, an assassin thrust his sword through the body of the Duke of Orleans after an amorous tryst with his sister-in-law, the Queen, the lovely Isabeau. Makine, himself, as an adult, will find himself, almost miraculously, in this very same alleyway. In between his idyllic visits to Saranza and Grandmother Charlotte, Makine is growing up in grim shabbiness in his parents' home in Moscow. Large apartment blocks built in the grandiose Stalinist style stand out in stark contrast to the "mysterious French essence" of Grandmother Charlotte and her home on the steppes. Makine wants to literally absorb France's Belle Epoque, but he must contend with his socialist schoolmates instead. Impressionable and in love with a land he can only dream about, Makine rebels against both the ordinariness of Soviet life and the grandmother he loves but fails to understand. A true master of prose, Makine contrasts Russia and France beautifully. Several times in the novel, Russia is mentioned as breathing and alive; the world of harsh realities. France, on the other hand, is a dream world and its images are spun from the rich and elaborate Impressionistic language of fantasy. Although Dreams of My Russian Summers was both written and translated by a man, the imagery evoked is decidedly feminine, especially that pertaining to France; the petite pomme of a smile in a photograph, the coupling hawkmoths with the death's head and the repeated image of the Verdun stone. The entire book, however, is the story of a young boy's maturation into a sensitive and intelligent man. A man who loves the present, yet has come to revere the past. A man who is thankful for the contrast provided in his life, a contrast he calls "an optical illusion" offering the most luminous moments of his life. Readers are offered nothing less than the beautiful fragility of a reverie, to be visited again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Prose taking us back to quiet summers .
Review: Atogether the best book of the last two years. Andrei creates the summers a child could experience before television, with a few conversations, gentle, quite, few words used to describe another time and another place, a time when finding a newspaper article in a suitcase creates for the child the feeling of an era past. Throughout this story one experiences the history of Eurpoe in the early twenith century in Paris and Russia. We are taken to view Paris in 1910, the Paris flood and Paris' celebration for Nicholas and Alexandria though they represent the aristocratic government France overthrew during her revolution. We follow Andrei's grandmother through the Russian Revolution and her survival. As a young man Andrei is pushed to face his emotional turmoil of being Russian with a French heritage. Superb! In my view another book which carries the quality of creating an era past is "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden.
Rating:
Summary: Moving tribute to a grandmother
Review: Author's dedication and fascination with his grandmother were extremely moving to me. I wish I could find the words to tell the story of my grandmother's life...
Rating: 
Summary: hit 'n miss
Review: Erk! What a difficult review to write! So uneven, so blurry and ephemeral in plot and character, but containing a scene or two of exquisite beauty and skilled craftsmanship... What do you say? "This book was a work of genius." The early scenes of Paris as imagined by a boy listening to stories his grandmother weaves - think of the depth and complexity of creating point of view, setting, and character that this scene entails. And Makine pulls it off. Paris feels...unreal, like a child's fantasy. Makine plunges into this fantastic Paris as if it is the story. As a result the reader's images, too, become tangled and unsure, and the reader, too, becomes entranced by Parisian fairy tales. "...overwritten, vague, and pretentious." Yup. The book features your typical first-year college writing class protagonist. You know the type. Emotionally blocked. Self-obsessed. Absolutely passive. Self-pitying. A bookish nerd, dissed by the cool kids in school because he's too sensitive. The kind of character that should be drop-kicked. "...an homage to Russian and France..." Y-e-e-s. And no. Anything to do with the grandmother is gold. Her descriptions of France as imagined through her grandson, the story of her travel through Russian during the Civil War, seeing her walk along the train tracks by her house on the Russian steppe. Yes. Otherwise...no. We learn nothing new about Russia here, most of the platitudes written by our simpering protagonist are romanticized, overblown, and images of the country. And those of us who have been to Paris cannot fully succumb to the images of France, especially with the image of a lonely artist clicking away on his typewriter, wearing winter coat in his unheated Paris apartment. It's like your typical year-abroad story at this point. Perhaps what ruined the book the most for me was the expectation placed upon it by word of mouth and critical acclaim. It isn't what it was said to be. (Lots of passive and contractions, there.) Lower your expectations.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing book
Review: I read that book in French (Le Testament Fran?ais) so it may be possible that the English translation isn't as good as the French one. I found that book so wonderful and the progression of the boy from childhood to adulthood is so well described. The images that Makine creates are beautiful and you can clearly see them. It's an excellent book for the ones who like to think and to dream.
Rating:
Summary: Pas plus au sujet de la France
Review: I'll spare you the details of this poorly-constructed novel, which, if you so choose, you may obtain for yourself. Let's get right to the commentary, shall we? At the beginning of this book, I sensed Makine's laborious attempt to be what I would call Gorky-esque. The subject matter in itself is really a theft committed against Maxim Gorky. Here is a boy, struggling with childhood and adolescence. Ostracized by his peers, he looks inward for explanations and consolation. The warm-hearted grandmother figure shines against the backdrop of a world that causes only pain and suffering. Apart from the story line itself, every sentence is cluttered with unnatural attempts at speech. Nothing but Charlotte's repeatedly-stressed French nationality is stated in a straightforward manner. Similes and metaphors abound. In just one example, Makine parodies life as a dance. The "mingling of bodies driven by desire and hiding it under innumerable pretences." How many authors have bored us to tears with their renditions of the meaning of life? To Makine, the utmost importance is placed upon "preserv[ing] and not[ing] past moments while at the same time going through the motions of everyday life." However, I ask you, aren't past moments to be preserved the direct product of everyday life? Shouldn't one's focus be on living the life first and only thereafter documenting the moments? The hurriedly confused dénouement is a feeble attempt to bring this book to a close. Ultimately, our "hero" discovers that he is not at all who he seems to be. As is quite obvious by my critique, I am sorry I wasted time on this one.
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