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Title: Requiem for a Lost Empire: A Novel by Andrei Makine ISBN: 0-7434-5362-X Publisher: Washington Square Press Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Telling the truth
Comment: It is always difficult to say what Andrei Makine's books are about. One could describe the plot or the story-line and feel that one hasn't said anything at all. Makine's novels are like all great works of art. They set up a resonance inside us that is intensely pleasureable and also painful. In Requiem, as in his other novels, Makine's prose is poetic and technically flawless, the historical content is fascinating and his irony and humor elicit a warm rush of recognition and laughter. Like all great art, it also makes us painfully aware of what is unexpressed in us.
If one can say that Dreams of My Russian Summers is "about" the birth of a writer, then Requiem for a Lost Empire is about the struggle to tell or speak the truth. There is a silence that bounds this struggle. The three generations of men in this novel live with the women they love largely in silence. One of the women even has her tongue cut out. Yet somehow, this silence is a state of grace. Most of the time we live in the contiuum between, caught between our superstitious fear of naming things and our compulsion to do so. Makine's efforts to tell the truth, whatever level of truth one wishes to draw from his writing, have produced an exquisitely beautiful and haunting novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: A century distilled
Comment: Andrei Makine adds another laurel to his impressive writing career with the release of Requiem for a Lost Empire. In this short book (250 pages) Makine surveys the past century of change in Russia from the fall of the Czars and the rise of the people, through Stalin and World War II, through the Cold War with its ominous KGB into today with the undercover lives of common men striving to retain the promises of Communism. Makine does this seemingly incredible feat through the eyes of one family - sons and fathers who lived through the various phases of critical change that Russia (empire, USSR, etc) has undergone. In nonlinear fashion he draws multifacted, complex characters with flashbacks and flashforwards in a way that makes this less a history book (though it is valuably one) than the novel it is. And as if that weren't enough, Makine writes with a grace and poetry that suffuse his tale with lasting visuals and ominous grit. That the author left Russia to live in France and has written all his books to date in Frence means that we are also experiencing the work of a master translator. This little book is a gripping masterwork - highly recommended reading.
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Title: Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel by Andrei Makine, Geoffrey Strachan ISBN: 0684852683 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1998 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: 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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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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