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Title: Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel by Andrei Makine, Geoffrey Strachan ISBN: 0-684-85268-3 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.19 (37 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Saber Dance of a novel to the tune of La Marseillaise.
Comment: The French have a bold champion in Andrei Makine. With his lyrical evocations of France's past, his depiction of France as the epitome of culture and refinement, the music of his language, and the obvious love for the culture which he evokes and shares with the reader, it is easy to see why he has won French prizes for this book.
But one does not have to be a Francophile also to find it gorgeous. The narrator of this seemingly autobiographical novel is a young Russian reminiscing about his remarkable French grandmother, a woman who, after her marriage to a Russian, lived nearly all her adult life in Siberia and whom he visited summers as a teenager. And it is also the story of the importance of dreams, how they meld imagination and recollection and how they infuse our lives, giving meaning and joy, especially in times of want or sorrow.
The narrator's dreams, sparked by the stories his grandmother tells of turn-of-the-century Paris/Atlantis, are not limited by real-life privations, or limited to his own era, country, social circle, or family. Instead, they allow him to roam through an earlier Paris, to know presidents, to banquet at sumptuous dinners of innumerable courses, to experience romantic love, to share a culture and language with Proust, to see the Paris opera or the circus. Though he admires the "tempestuous streets" of Paris, so different from the "perfect social calm" and "somnolent tranquility" of Siberia, he discovers, not surprisingly, that his peers resent his inner life-it is "a provocation in the eyes of those who live...in the present."
While the narrator tries to reconcile this constant emotional tension with the simultaneous pressures of adolescence, we come to know his grandmother as an extraordinary woman, a woman who chooses to remain in Siberia where she has suffered greatly and where her husband lies buried, and we can ache for her grandson, whose desire to learn firsthand what she already knows causes him turmoil. To call this a coming-of-age novel would be to do it a great disservice-the narrator's journey to self-awareness is absolutely unique and provides a thrilling new perspective from which the reader can contemplate his/her own life
Rating: 5
Summary: Lyrical memories of idyllic summers past
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: speak, memory
Comment: A lovely, lyrical "autobiographical novel". Makine, born Russian, has lived in France since 1987. This novel covers his extraordinary relationship with his grandmother, who sets his life in motion by re-telling stories of her French past. This is a wonderful book, filled with spare, powerful writing. One of the loveliest books I've read in a long time.
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Title: Requiem for a Lost Empire: A Novel by Andrei Makine ISBN: 074345362X Publisher: Washington Square Press Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Once upon the River Love by Andrei Makine, Geoffrey Strachan ISBN: 0140283625 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Music of a Life : A Novel by Andrei Makine ISBN: 1559706376 Publisher: Arcade Publishing Pub. Date: 15 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer by Andrei Makine ISBN: 0142000019 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 28 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Hero's Daughter : A Novel by Andrei Makine ISBN: 1559706872 Publisher: Arcade Publishing Pub. Date: 29 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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