Reviews

• Muy buen libro

  Excelente

• stopped me in my tracks

  I had been going through a slew of memoirs when I picked this one up: it was different. The first thing I noticed, about 50 pages in, was that one has to read this book slowly and carefully, paying strict attention. It's a literary memoir, not a casual read. Makine's style here is elliptical and oblique, meaning that if you go to fast there's a lot that you'll miss. I think I know the novel well now. I have read it twice and also read it twice in French. I see it as a challenging book that has repaid my effort. One thing that's a bit depressing is that this translation into English, I feel, was done by somebody who was better at French than at writing English. Geoffrey Strachan manages to dig up the meaning of many terms and expressions that I was unaware of, yet when it comes time to string them all together into paragraphs, doesn't do such a great job. The tone of the resulting prose (in English) swings between whimsical, tragic, clinical, dry, ironic, etc., in a way that the original French doesn't. In other words, Makine's original has a consistency of tone -- a sort of stunned, dreamy tone -- that is lost in translation, appearing in Strachan's job only in fits and starts. I say "novel," because it is. Makine makes like he's writing the story of his grandmother, but he admitted in later interviews that he didn't even have a French-Russian grandmother (!), and that this was pretty much made up. Thus I say novel.

• Andrei Makine,

  I read Dreams of My Russian Summers a long time ago. Recently I met a Russian woman and we talked about this book. I re-read it, loved, and have since read two more of Makine's books. Beautiful, evocative read. Interesting that Makine, Russian by birth, writes Russian books, lives in France, writes in French, and we get the stories in translation.

• Three Stars

  Interesting and informative

• The reading guide for this novel compares it to work by Nabokov and other great Russian authors

  71 of 75 for 2015. The reading guide for this novel compares it to work by Nabokov and other great Russian authors, although I can't really see that. The book, written originally in French and presented here as an English translation, tells the story of a young man growing up in Soviet era Russia, spending his summers with his grandmother, a native of Paris. As someone who grew up in all the tension of the Cold War, I am fascinated by stories that tell of the life of my counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Essentially a Bildungsroman, the story of Andrei and his grandmother's history, the novel takes us through many years of growth, including the period when his "difference," that French background he has from his grandmother, stands in the way of his acceptance as a good soviet youth. The book has four separate, but interrelated time lines: the narrator's summers with Charlotte, his grandmother; the narrator's school years when he lives with his parents, then his aunt after his parents' deaths; Charlotte's youth in early 20th Century Paris; and the narrator's life after he leaves Russia for the West, primarily set in Paris. The first three weave their strands through most of the book. The fourth is presented almost as an addendum: and then I grew up. This is not one of my "light and frivolous" reads. Lots of detail here, and for me at least, a slow read, but worthwhile.

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