Rating: 
Summary: Something lost in the translation...
Review: In typical contemporary French fashion, there is an elliptical quality to this fictionalized memoir which suits the content. Nonetheless, Makine's fundamentally emotional story loses something in the translation I fear. The workmanlike rendition by Strachan eliminates the emotional richness of the French language and the Russian cultural impulse toward storytelling. What we receive in English is far more cool and clinical than I suspect it should be.
Rating: 
Summary: A Saber Dance of a novel to the tune of La Marseillaise.
Review: The French have a bold champion in Andrei Makine. With his lyrical evocations of France's past, his depiction of France as the epitome of culture and refinement, the music of his language, and the obvious love for the culture which he evokes and shares with the reader, it is easy to see why he has won French prizes for this book. But one does not have to be a Francophile also to find it gorgeous. The narrator of this seemingly autobiographical novel is a young Russian reminiscing about his remarkable French grandmother, a woman who, after her marriage to a Russian, lived nearly all her adult life in Siberia and whom he visited summers as a teenager. And it is also the story of the importance of dreams, how they meld imagination and recollection and how they infuse our lives, giving meaning and joy, especially in times of want or sorrow. The narrator's dreams, sparked by the stories his grandmother tells of turn-of-the-century Paris/Atlantis, are not limited by real-life privations, or limited to his own era, country, social circle, or family. Instead, they allow him to roam through an earlier Paris, to know presidents, to banquet at sumptuous dinners of innumerable courses, to experience romantic love, to share a culture and language with Proust, to see the Paris opera or the circus. Though he admires the "tempestuous streets" of Paris, so different from the "perfect social calm" and "somnolent tranquility" of Siberia, he discovers, not surprisingly, that his peers resent his inner life-it is "a provocation in the eyes of those who live...in the present." While the narrator tries to reconcile this constant emotional tension with the simultaneous pressures of adolescence, we come to know his grandmother as an extraordinary woman, a woman who chooses to remain in Siberia where she has suffered greatly and where her husband lies buried, and we can ache for her grandson, whose desire to learn firsthand what she already knows causes him turmoil. To call this a coming-of-age novel would be to do it a great disservice-the narrator's journey to self-awareness is absolutely unique and provides a thrilling new perspective from which the reader can contemplate his/her own life
Rating:
Summary: A durable masterpiece
Review: 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!
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