Customer Reviews

Le Testament Francais

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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.

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.

Well written, typical russian type of story, makes you cry, makes you laugh, strong emotions.

Andreļ Makine was born in 1957! He requested political asylum in Paris in 1987, just a few years before the debacle of the USSR. He found a publisher in France for "Le Testament Franēaise" in 1995. Let me repeat: Andreļ Makine was BORN in 1957! The "memories" of his summers spent with his French Grandmother in the the village of Saranza, on the edge of the Russian steppes, begin roughly at age seven, therefore in 1964; those summer visits continue until roughly age 17, 1974! I need to keep reminding myself of this chronological framework because none of Makine's childhood memories fit into the world as I knew it from 1964 to 1974. Those 'summers with Grandmother' MUST have taken place 100 years earlier! Makine's "memories" of his own childhood seem as remote and pre-modern as Nabokov's in his autobiographical "Speak Memory". It's a jarring as a gunshot in the street when the boy Andreļ refers casually to the American Moon Landing or even to TV. Of course, it's the "memories" of the Grandmother, told in charming French to the boy and his older sister, that counterpoint the boy's own memories of 'differentness' during his winters with adoptive parents in Moscow. The narrative is lushly nostalgic by design, of course, and that nostalgia frames a history of Russia from the last years of the Tsar, through the two World Wars and the death of Stalin, to the very threshold of the unglamorous post-Communist 'New Russia'.

I've put the word "memories" in parentheses for a reason. There seems to be some question about the 'autobiographical' veracity of this book, even about whether Makine actually had a French Grandmother. It doesn't impinge on the content or quality of the book; whether it's 'veracity' or 'verisimilitude', the book is structured as a memoir, very carefully structured in fact, in a format that most readers will automatically find comfortable. In effect, it's an 'old-fashioned' tale of a childhood half golden, half leaden. The prose seems as much transported from the earliest 1900s as the atmosphere of the Grandmother's home in Saranza. Marcel Proust is a presence in the Grandmother's description of her childhood in France, and Makine's prose is undeniably deliberately Proustian. There's a strong resemblance -- too strong to be accidental -- also to the loosely autobiographical memoirs of Marcel Pagnol, "Le Chateau de Ma Mere" & "La Gloire de Mon Pere." Makine's prose is certainly not as bejeweled with brilliance as Proust's, nor as tangy and redolent of the earth as Pagnol's, but it's gorgeously 'literary' in a favorable sense of the term. I'd go so far as to say that Makine has chosen to polish his style into a facsimile of 'Belle Epoque' elegance, like a well-crafted reproduction of an antique buffet or chandelier. I suspect that it's his graceful antiquarian prose that has made Makine a best-seller. No slight intended! It's lovely stuff to read. It tells of the horrors of the two Wars and the Soviet oppression in graphic terms, yet retains an atmosphere of misty romance. It's "Modern Lite." Again, no slight intended; into each reader's life a little Romance must come.

It is unusual love story, love in many senses... The story starts slowly, developing in several historical and geografical planes planes. In some parts it looks more like memoirs, not a novel, because all characters are vrey realistic.