The Crime of Olga Arbyelina - Softcover

Makine, Andrei

3.44

494 ratings by Goodreads

9780140298420: The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140298428 ISBN 13: 9780140298420

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Olga Arbyelina--a rumored Russian princess, refugee from the Bolsheviks, and abandoned wife--is found half-naked on the riverbank, next to the body of a man who mysteriously drowned, in a new novel by the critically acclaimed author of Dreams of My Russian Summers. Reader's Guide included. Reprint.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Olga Arbyelina is a princess who fled Russia during the revolution; now she lives in a town near Paris tending to her hemophiliac son, keeping ghosts at bay--an existence hollowed out by history. The town gossips obsess over her, making her into the prime character in their "game of a thousand voices." They "had a fleeting dream of figuring in a poignant melodrama called The Exiled Princess." When she is found lying next to a dead man on the local riverbank, her fame only increases. The Crime of Olga Arbyelina begins with this grim discovery and moves backward, trying to find the erotic transgressions and terrible secrets that separate this exile from the tired and ordinary world.

Andrei Makine resembles his heroine in that he is a kind of runaway; born in 1958, he fled the Soviet Union for France. There he wrote about his homeland in his adopted tongue. The well-received novels Once Upon the River Love and Dreams of My Russian Summers first appeared in French and have since been translated widely. Perhaps it is all these layers of language and memory that make his prose so thick and difficult; clearly there is a great clumsiness in this particular translation, which is rife with sentences like "She was breathing jerkily," and "A thought struck her with the painfulness and beauty of its truth." Ultimately, such writing sabotages The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, fogging up the book's exotic landscape. Translations can work two ways: they can transport you into a world of strange new music, or they can feel like schoolwork. This book is definitely the latter: you know it's supposed to be a learning experience, but the difficult, self-serious prose makes you want to resist, stare at the clock, play hooky. --Emily White

About the Author:

Andre� Makine was born in 1958 and left the former Soviet Union to emigrate to France ten years ago. Dreams of My Russian Summers won both the Goncourt and Medicis prizes, France's two top literary awards, and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.