Every summer young Andre* visits his grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he loves dearly. In a dusty village overlooking the vast Russian steppes, she captivates her grandson and the other children of the village with wondrous talesÑwatching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, Tsar Nicholas IIÕs visit to Paris, French president Felix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress. But from his mysterious grandmother Andre* also learns of a Russia he has never known: a country of famine and misery, brutal injustice, and the hopeless chaos of war. Enthralled, he weaves her stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. A poignant story of a Soviet boyÕs ascent into adulthood in the 1960s and Õ70s, DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS is an epic tale full of passion and tenderness, pain and heartbreak, mesmerizing in every way.
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About the Author
Andre* Makine is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, all published by Arcade. He divides his time between Paris and a village in southwestern France.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love in a callous world,
By Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Human Love: A Novel (Hardcover)
Among the characteristics Andrei Makine's novels are renowned for are his exquisite depiction of people. His characters persevere in challenging circumstances, and his beautifully poetic language evokes the wide range of human emotions. Two examples of his great literary talents are, in my mind, Music of a Life: A Novel and The Woman Who Waited: A Novel. However, Makine's captivating new novel, while at one level a heart-rending love story, departs from his more familiar scenarios and locales. The story's primary dramatic setting is in a Southern African conflict zone spanning a period of forty years. Human relationships, profound feelings and basic survival skills are tested to breaking point against adverse realities. In contrast, and maybe surprisingly, Siberia, Makine's childhood home, gains prominence as a metaphor for harmony, tolerance and happiness.
The novel's hero is Elias Almeida, a self-declared "professional revolutionary", who dreams of an Africa where independence and political change will also transform people into "better human beings". Son of an Angolan freedom fighter against Portuguese colonial rule, Elias has to watch helplessly as his parents die, brutally murdered by soldiers. His escape and survival bring him in contact with a range of teachers and mentors, nurturing in him an amalgam of Christian ethics and Marxist ideology. His training takes him from Angola to Cuba, the Soviet Union and back to his home country, where, he believes, he will fight for the realization of his vision of a better future. Despite his intentions to do the right thing, Elias is constantly undermined by the adverse circumstances he is caught up in. Makine depicts the ruthless historical context - from colonial rule to the East and West scrambling for influence zones in Africa's newly independent states. Connecting the actual historical events with the Elias's personal experiences Makine illustrates the contradictions between internalized propaganda and political idealism on the one hand and cold-blooded Cold War reality and ensuing destructive civil wars on the other. What sustains Elias above anything else throughout his struggle is his profound "amour humain", a concept wider-reaching than the English "human love" of the novel's title. It encompasses both the love between individuals and the love for "humanity". His love for Anna, a young Russian woman who he meets in Moscow, encapsulated both aspects for him. "Without the love he felt for that woman, life would not have been more than a night without end...", muses the narrator at the beginning of the novel. Extensive parts of Elias's story are told in retrospect by a nameless narrator, a former idealistic Soviet spy turned into a disillusioned Russian author. While attending an international conference on "sustainable development" in Africa, he intends to use Elias as an example of "African Life Stories in Literature". Fragments of notes about Elias, collected over a period of twenty five years, trigger his memory: accounts where he has been either the listener or an active participants in events. This narrative technique brings different features of his hero into focus, portraying his character and personal history from different angles and through different timelines. Direct dialogue alternates with reflections. Contrasting the two main characters, Makine gives the narrator a platform to raise, over time, increasingly thought-provoking and politically and morally challenging questions. While his admiration for Elias does not diminish, the narrator's own growing sarcasm distances him more and more from the idealism of his friend. The importance of Elias's love for Anna, nevertheless, gains in significance for him as well. Themes are introduced briefly, only to be picked up later and filled out with more detail. The international conference is an important recurring theme, as it allows the narrator not only to look back but also to voice his growing disenchantment and cynicism regarding the "fat-neck" Africans in designer suits who circle such conferences and the white "experts" from the "West", who have their own political reasons for their interests in Africa. Geoffrey's Strachan's sensitive and fluid translation beautifully conveys Makine's superb language and style. [Friederike Knabe] This is a revised version of my original review.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"If the revolution doesn't change the way we love, what's the point of all this fighting?",
By
This review is from: Human Love: A Novel (Hardcover)
Andrei Makine is somewhat of a latter day Joseph Conrad. First, he writes his novels in an adopted language -- French, in the case of Makine, who was born in Russia and moved to Paris when (I believe) he was 30. Second, his latest novel HUMAN LOVE will undoubtedly elicit from many reviewers references and allusions to the Africa of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." And, like Conrad, Makine is a first rate writer and an astute observer of human character. But I am not ready to call Makine a great writer, at least based on HUMAN LOVE.
HUMAN LOVE is a jaded retrospective look at both the Russian/Marxist revolutionary program and post-colonial nationalistic politics in Africa. The message of the novel is, somewhat simplistically, that all that has real value is human love, although the novel contains no more than one or two fleeting examples of redeeming human love in practice. The anonymous narrator of the novel is a Soviet Russian, probably a diplomat or spy turned author. The novel begins when the narrator first encounters an African, Elias Almeida, when the two are imprisoned together by crazed rebels in a prison hut on the frontier between Angola and Zaire some time in the 1970s. The narrator then proceeds to tell the life story of Elias, from age 11 in 1961 in colonial Angola, his mother reduced to surviving by whoring with Portuguese soldiers; to joining his father and Che Guevera fighting as revolutionaries in the eastern Congo (Che moves on, Elias's father is killed, quite possibly by one of the Portuguese soldiers whom his mother had serviced); to Cuba; to Moscow, where he is trained as an intelligence agent; and then back to Africa where he participates as a Soviet agent in numerous subversive actions throughout the continent. In the end, Elias despairs of changing the world or the violent and greedy nature of most humans. He instead finds meaning in a few simple moments of everyday life and in a few isolated instances of love, principally a brief time he shared with a Russian young woman, Anna, who took him for a trip to where she had been born among the survivors of a Stalinist gulag in remote Siberia. Both he and Anna, however, forsake their love in the interest of their own "careers"; coincidentally, those careers cross again in the early 1990s in Mogadishu, Somalia. As the narrator tells his story of Elias, from time to time he returns to the present, which for him is the mid- to late-1990s at a conference somewhere in Africa devoted to the current state of cultural affairs in Africa and attended by "fat cat Africans of the international conference circuit" with uninhibited libidos and thousand-dollar suits, cheered on by parasitic, second-tier intelligentsia from the West. The narrator's disgust for the shallowness and hypocrisy of the conference participants mirrors the disillusionment of Elias Almeida. HUMAN LOVE is marked by many memorable episodes and scenes (the majority of which involve almost unspeakable violence and cruelty), and there is much sparkling and brilliant writing. My problem with the novel is that it is not very subtle. Makine writes with an aloofness and omniscience that borders on arrogance. His points or messages are expressly stated, almost didactically so, rather than left for the reader to draw on his own. I remember being quite impressed by the two other novels of Makine's that I have read, "Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer" and "Music of a Life". Perhaps my critical standards have evolved in the six or more years since I read them or perhaps, as I suspect is more likely, HUMAN LOVE is not quite their equal.
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The horror! The horror!",
By
This review is from: Human Love: A Novel (Hardcover)
N.B: SOME READERS MAY FEEL THAT I AM GIVING AWAY TOO MUCH OF THE STORY IN THIS REVIEW.
In 1961 Angola is in rebellion against the Portuguese colonialists. Elias Almeida, an African, is eleven years old. His father is a revolutionary who has fled to the Congo to help in the liberation of that country from its Belgian rulers. The Portuguese take it out on the wife he had left behind. The motherless boy meets a Portuguese Communist who introduces him to Marxism and Leninism. In 1965, at the age of 15 he decides to join his father in the Congo. A Cuban officer called Ernesto (we later see that he is actually Che Guevara - and a very unflattering portrait it is of him) is trying to make ideologically motivated revolutionaries out of the African rebels, but is disgusted when what they demand is food and pay rather than theory, and when they do win a skirmish, they indulge in an orgy of violence and debauchery. The government troops in large numbers draw near. The Cuban leaves. His parting message is that they should disband and individually "blend in with the populace". During the flight, Elias' father is killed; but Elias somehow escapes, and two lines of text bring him from Africa to Cuba. In 1970, disappointed by the windy rhetoric of Castro, he leaves for the Soviet Union, in the hope of finding there something more solid. He studies Marxism more intensively, receives training as an urban guerilla, and in 1974 is sent back to Angola to further its liberation from the Portuguese. He leaves behind a Russian woman he loves and who loves him. Angola achieved its independence in 1975, only to descend into a savage civil war between Neto's Marxist MPLA government and Savimbi's UNITA opposition. Elias is now an intelligence officer working with the government. In 1978 is captured by UNITA rebels. He is saved from death by a Cuban attack on the prison. UNITA was eventually defeated; the MPLA establishment becomes corrupt and luxury-loving, and once again the ideals that Elias has fought for have been besmirched. The role of diamonds, oil, the meddling of the CIA and the Soviet Union. But, disillusioned though he is, in 1984 Elias is still working as a Soviet intelligence agent in the morass of Zaire. There follow a series of grotesque vignettes as we move from one corrupt and blood-soaked African country to another: Congo-Brazzaville, Bokassa's Central African Republic, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ethiopia and Somalia. The last is the scene of the novel's climactic end (where, however, I think Makine has conflated the sacking of the Soviet Embassy in 1977 and the abandonment of the American Embassy in 1991.) In the course of time Elias has detected empty theatricality in ideological communist rhetoric and has noted how little it was in touch with the humdrum rhythms of the lives of ordinary people. Disillusioned time and time again by what he saw of communism in practice, he still "wanted to hold on to his faith at all costs". Above all, he saw a huge disconnect between, on the one hand, this rhetoric and the unideological brutishness and savagery involved on both sides in the liberation wars, and, on the other, what really matters in life, which is people loving one another. He had known love only once - the love of and from his mother. He encountered much sexual coupling - either for merely for merely temporary gratification (and had himself experienced that) or, more horrifyingly, in the form of rape. He frequently wondered what is the point of a revolution which does not raise human relationships above these merely sensual connections. He despised young European bourgeois women who became involved in Africa or Cuba; he saw their identification with the revolution as being merely modish, their sexual encounters with black men as trophies. And then, in Moscow, he found real (though unconsummated) love. Anna was born in Siberia: her father had been in a gulag; her mother was still living there. Elias accompanies Anna on a visit to her mother. He experiences a kind of epiphany in that vast snowy landscape and among the people he meets there: political exiles who have served years in the now empty camps and now live a "humble existence ... perfectly emancipated from the capricious rhetoric of the age". He has long given up the illusion that he is participating in changing the world - his achievement is to be measured by smaller things than this, like managing to save one small village in Angola by persuading the local UNITA force not to resume the fight. What has kept him going are such small successes, but above all his enduring love for Anna (though she is now married to a Soviet diplomat), the memory of his epiphany in Siberia and his hope one day to return there, and the awareness that all human life, with all its suffering, is but a brief moment under eternal starry skies. This passionate novel is beautifully written and translated, with much haunting imagery; but I have a problem with it. I can understand the tragedy of a man torn between the love of a woman and the call to a noble cause which he feels he must serve. I can understand the tragedy of a man who has seen through the formulaic rhetoric of apparatchiks; has seen liberation, not just once, but over and over again, in country after country, turn sour, drowned in savagery and corruption; and has witnessed all the ideals in which he believed compromised, trampled underfoot. What I cannot see worthy of the respect with which Elias is treated in this book is that he should have continued for the whole of his life actively to serve regimes he has recognized as negating in practice all his ideals.
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