Customer Reviews

Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Yes, there is a lot of dreaming in this book, dreams about the France of the Belle Epoque. But those dreams are surely not the most fascinating aspect of the book, for these dreams are mostly necessary to counterbalance the horrors of living in Russia during the years of the revolutionary wars and Stalinism. The narrator's grandmother just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So in the end she must be glad to have saved a quiet life on the endless steppe.

She shares her dreams with the narrator, who is her grandson and visits her regularly during the summer holidays. For him too, the second French identitiy becomes a means of surviving the time of Stalinist uniformity. This is a book of epiphanies, without which, the narrator comes to realize, life would not be bearable. The lyrical passages alternate with shocking factual descriptions - and there is a story, too, with a very amusing and revealing twist in the end.

This novel is unque in placing me into the transparent and transcental dimension of memory. It let me feel the power of reflectoin and voices from the distant past or other worlds. This novel doesn't have to be compared to Proust's masterpiece. The stream of narration and the language (I am reading an English translation) is almost mesmerizing, sending the reader off this world. I would place this as one of the best literary work.

To be honest, I was expecting a bit more from this book. Somehow I expected it to be more sweeping, to be more engaging, and in reality it was not. The book, and the author's feelings about his native Russia, are summed up in a passage in the book which reads, "Russia, like a bear after a long winter, was awakening within me. A pitiless, beautiful, absurd, unique Russia. A Russia pitted against the rest of the world by its somber destiny." My disappointment in the book overall is not a recommendation against the book. It simply serves to point out that this book, like many others, is not perfect. Makine, though, is a gifted writer with a keen eye for detail. He writes eloquently of the "unique Russia" which is so foreign to non-Russians. He illustrates starkly that non-Russians are not, no matter how well-versed on Russian history, literature, language, going to fully understand Russia and "Russianness". However, he lends insight to those of us who might like to try. By recounting his Siberian youth in this semi-autobiographical account Makine provides a coming-of-age tale and new cultural perspectives. Another interesting point about this book is Makine's own struggle to come to terms with being Russian, leaving Russia and becoming French, "Yes, if I had occasion to weep at the death of my parents, it was because I felt Russian. And the French graft in my heart began, at times, to give me great pain."

The book was originally written in French, and as yet, I have not read the original French. The translation, however, is a worthwhile glimpse into Makine's debut work.

Andrei Makine's book, Dreams of My Russian Summer's, is a very special book. Even though the author wrote the book in French, and I read it in translation (English), the writing is fantastic. It takes a little getting used to it, it's very "flowery", just to give you fair warning, but once you get used to it, you'll appreciate it. And despite all the attention given to the language, quite a bit actually happens, the dialogue doesn't stand still. It's a moving and interesting story.

The story is told in retrospect in the first person. It's a memory. We are told that he has a grandmother who has both French and Russian backgrounds, born and raised in France and married a Russian and lived out the rest of her life there, making her way through world wars and quirky Russian society. What we're not told immediately is why the narrator is fixated on his grandmother's dual nationality, which is what the novel is about.

Take time to enjoy the language and to fully appreciate the details of the story. I immediately reread the first 20 pages upon finishing, just to make sure I didn't miss anything important. This 1995 book will definitely be read and reread for a long time.

I read that book in French (Le Testament Français) 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.