Once Upon the River Love [Audio Cassette]

Andrei Makine (Author), Geoffrey Howard (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2000

In the tiny Siberian village of Svetlaya, three young men band together against the harshness of the physical and political environment during the last years of the Soviet Empire. Dreaming of an alternative life, they seek inspiration from the films of Jean-Paul Belmondo.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Readers of Andrei Makine's previous novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, will recognize similar themes in Once upon the River Love: characters living in the vast isolation of the Siberian steppes; an elderly woman with memories of Paris, and, most of all, the power of imagination in young children's lives. In Makine's second novel, three adolescents come of age in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. The narrator, Alyosha, and his two friends, Samurai and Utkin, live in Svetlaya, a remote village "reduced to three essential matters: timber, gold, and the chill shadow of the camp. It was beyond us to imagine our futures unfolding outside these three prime elements." Impossible to imagine, that is, until the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo enters their lives.

Into a wintry world of snow and ice, of spiritual paucity, loveless coupling, and quiet despair Belmondo flashes his insouciant smile, vanquishes enemies, seduces willing beauties, and faces every danger with panache. The effect is earth-shattering. "On the whole, we understood little of the universe of Belmondo.... But we perceived the essential: the surprising freedom of this multiple world, where people seemed to escape those implacable laws that ruled our own lives, from the humblest workers' canteen to the imperial hall of the Kremlin, not forgetting the silhouettes of the watchtowers fixed over the camp." What would be an imminently forgettable film in the West becomes a beacon to the three boys; suddenly, the world is much bigger than the frozen Siberian taiga and each boy sees some part of Belmondo in himself: Alyosha the lover, Samurai the warrior, Utkin the poet.

Makine's novel is framed with short sections at beginning and end that are set in Brighton Beach, New York, 20 years later. We learn, briefly, what has happened to these young men--and in the disparity between the reality of their destinies and the heroism of their youthful imaginings lies both the irony and the heartbreak of Once upon the River Love --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Dreams of My Russian Summers, the first novel from Russian ?migr? Makine to be translated into English from his adopted French, astonished readers on both sides of the Atlantic by applying the methods of Proust to exotic contemporary material: the love of French language and culture that a young Russian inherits, with terrible family secrets, from his grandmother. Published in France one year before Dreams, this sensuous, sentimental novel reveals more of the strengths and limitations of Makine's ardent traditionalism. The tale's central event is the arrival of a series of Jean-Paul Belmondo comedies at the local cinema in a small town in Siberia. The movies herald the end of the Soviet era for three local boys by giving them a taste of the WestAfor tough, valiant "Samurai," the heroic gesture as an end in itself; for crippled Utkin, the writer's life as an escape from banality and sexual rejection; for Mitya, the beautiful narrator (nicknamed "Don Juan"), endless erotic adventures. The movie viewings coincide with Alyosha's first, doomed affair with a local prostitute and the initiation of the three youths into French literature (at the hands of Samurai's aristocratic aunt), but the films haunt them even after they grow up to leave the Soviet Union. Richly allegorical, Once Upon the River Love (the title is a pun on the Russian and French names of the Siberian river Amur) is self-consciously retrograde as literature, happy to borrow its concerns and techniques from old French masters. Beneath the artistic conservatism that Makine shares with his great contemporaries Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky lies that nostalgia for a dream-West that illuminates his deliberately mythologized Siberian landscape, where blizzards regularly snow in villages up to the chimneys and every step East or West takes one toward Asia or Europe: his Swann's and Guermantes' Ways. Makine has given American readers another unforgettable novel, which wears its exoticism on its sleeve, commands respect and defies imitation. (Aug.) FYI: Makine was the first writer to win France's highest two literary honors, the Prix Medicis and Prix Goncourt, for the same novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Books on Tape (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0736645950
• ISBN-13: 978-0736645959
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,024,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hypnotic, August 9, 2000

By 

Lev Raphael - See all my reviews

This review is from: Once upon the River Love (Mass Market Paperback)

Russian-born novelist Andrei Makine's romantic and Proustian autobiographical first novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, was quite appropriately written in French because its subject was largely the centuries-old love affair that Russians have had with French culture in all its forms. Set mostly in a grim, Stalinist Siberia, it charted a boy's intoxication with his grandmother's lustrous memories of turn-of-the-century Paris. That inheritance of lost treasures eventually caused him deep conflict, but Makine resolved it by becoming a writer.

And what a writer, even in translation. His prose in that book was a lavish, slow torrent, lush and haunting. Not surprisingly, Makine is the first novelist to have received France's prestigious Prix Medicis and Prix Goncourt for the same book.

His new novel, set in the 1960s, is equally as focused on dreams of glamor and glory contrasting with a dismal Siberian reality as crushingly onerous as the Soviet system that has planted prison camps there. And once again, it's aspects of French culture that come to symbolize everything fresh, exciting, and free that is missing in the narrator's life.

Reading this novel you enter a fascinating and quite alien world of snow, silence and history-as-nightmare, where blizzards cover towns with a weight that equals the burden of collectivization and the calamities of Russia's decades of devastation through Revolution, civil war, and war. In this setting, the brutal regularity of the winters is as heedlessly cruel as the inane Communist Party slogans and official optimism that ceaselessly forecast a glorious future proving the truth of Marxism- Leninism. But what about the barren here-and-now?

The handsome narrator Dimitri (nicknamed Don Juan) and his two eenaged friends struggle with all the familiar burdens of adolescence. Not surprisingly, Dimitri's first sexual encounter, with a prostitute whose life also affects his two friends, doesn't reveal the glories of love, but grotesque chagrin l'amour instead. It's Makine's rich prose that makes something original out of all the cliched inchoate longings for life, experience, certainty and identity. His prose--and the bitter, empty life in Dimitri's eastern Siberian town where people feel "condemned to this natural beauty, and to the suffering that it conceals."

Into that void shines an unexpected beam of light far grander than the Trans-Siberian Railway and its mysterious, magnetic passengers glimpsed through windows. Quixotically, the local cinema starts showing an adventure film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and everyone for miles around starts lining up to see this movie not once, but dozens of times. In its chic, humor, and self-reflectiveness, the film offers unimaginable gifts to its Siberian audience. They see the unknown West there: excitement, sensuality, freedom, adventure, wit and sparkling fun. Belmondo's gorgeous smile on the movie poser undercuts years of fear and oppression under the Soviet system. And each of the trio of boys ironically finds deep lessons in the frivolous movie, identifying with different aspects of Belmondo's character: Lover, Warrior, and Poet.

Though the book is touchingly beautiful, it doesn't have quite the weight of Dreams of My Russian Summers, perhaps because there's no central figure who commands as much fascination as the grandmother there. You wonder if this book might not have made a better novella with some of the lushness trimmed away. At times the book's intoxication with language (which is its major strength), can even feel a bit exasperating. As H.G. Wells described Henry James's later style, you feel you're watching an elephant trying to pick up a pea.

But that's only an occasional problem. Most of the time you're happily, dreamily swept away, which is poetically appropriate. For the name of the Siberian river near Dimitri's town is Amur, also a Russian name for Cupid. And in French, the River Amur is spelled "Amour," which of course means love.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encountering sex and art in a Siberian wasteland., April 13, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Once upon the River Love (Mass Market Paperback)

In a callous and cold Siberian village, whose inhabitants' lives revolve around timber, prisoners, and gold, there is no room for romance and beauty. Makine tells the story of three young boys who are full of indiscernible longings, until a Belmondo film arrives at a nearby town and gives voice to all their dreams. In one of novel's most poignant chapters, Makine describes how each of the three boys sees a different hero on the cinema screen- for the hardened Samurai, it is Belmondo's feats of bravery; for the crippled Utkin, it is his stoicism in the face of lifelong disappointment; and for the poet Dmitri, it is the alluring Western world of beauty and sensuality. Makine brings powerful emotion to both Dmitri's sexual desire and his longing to experience the West. Perhaps more than any other author, Makine manages to find intense lyric beauty in this carnal desire, devoting pages to blurry visions of female flesh. But most of all, this masterfully crafted novel leaves the reader with an emotional and philosophical understanding of how a single work of art can forever change the course of three human lives.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful book on growing up in Siberia, July 2, 2002

By 

Linda Oskam "dutch-traveller" (Amsterdam Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Once upon the River Love (Mass Market Paperback)

Samurai, Oetkin and the narrator, Juan, grow up in a sleepy town in Siberia. Their futures seem to be settled: one becomes a gold digger, lumberjack or prison guard, has sex with one of the local woman and slowly drinks oneself dead. But all three boys are idealists and dreamers in their own way, full of unfulfilled desires, who all somehow realize that there must be more to life. Only when they see the movie "The Red October" with Jean-Paul Belmondo, they realize that they can take their lives into their own hands.

Andrei Makine wrote a beautiful novel in which the reader can feel the snow and the Siberian cold and the hopelessness of life in a Siberian village, but also with exquisite descriptions of Siberian springs, romance, melancholy and unfulfilled desires. A great book.