Dreams of My Russian Summers

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.

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...

Les atmospheres sont tres attachantes, on y retrouve l'ame slave et les chagrins et bonheurs de l'enfance et de l'adolescence.

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.

The book is well written. I have read the French, the Finnish and the English versions and I do admire all these works. The story is beautiful and at the end sensitive, too. The differences between 2 cultures come clearly up.