Dreams of My Russian Summers: A Novel - Softcover

Makine, Andreļ

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611450543 ISBN 13: 9781611450545

Publisher: Arcade, 2011

Synopsis

Every summer, young Andrei visits his grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he loves dearly. In a dusty village overlooking the vast Russian steppes, she captivates her grandson and the other children of the village with wondrous tales watching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, Tsar Nicholas II’s visit to Paris, French president Felix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress. But from his mysterious grandmother, Andrei also learns of a Russia he has never known: a country of famine and misery, brutal injustice, and the hopeless chaos of war.

Enthralled, he weaves her stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. She creates for him a vivid portrait of the France of her childhood, a distant Atlantis far more elegant, carefree, and stimulating than Russia in the 1970s and 80s. Her warm, artful memories of her homeland and of books captivate Andrei. Absorbed in this vision, he becomes an outsider in his own country, and eventually a restless traveler around Europe. Dreams of My Russian Summers is an epic full of passion and tenderness, pain and heartbreak, mesmerizing in every way.

About this title

Review:

Each summer, Andrei Makine's narrator and his sister leave the Soviet Union for the mythical land of France-Atlantis. That this country is a beautiful confabulation, a consolation existing only in his maternal grandmother's mind, makes it no less real. Though Charlotte Lemonnier lives in a town on the edge of the steppe, each night she journeys to a long-ago Paris, telling tales that the children then translate with their more Russian minds: "The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion--that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm ..."

Makine's first novel is a singing tribute to the alchemy of inspiration, but it is no less familiar with the sorrows of reality. And it is only as he gets older that the narrator begins to piece together his grandmother's far more tragic past--her experiences in the Great War, the October Revolution, and after. Dreams of My Russian Summers is a love letter to an extraordinary woman (it's hard not to see the book as autobiographical) as well as to language and literature, which the boy turns to in avoidance of history's manipulations. It has all the marks of an instant classic.

About the Author:

Andreļ Makine was born in Russia in 1957 and emigrated to France in 1987. In 1995 his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers won the Goncourt Prize and the Médicis Prize, France’s two most prestigious literary awards.

Geoffey Strachan has translated works from French and German in a wide variety of fields, including all the novels of Andreļ Makine. He has been awarded both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Schlegel-Treck Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcade
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1611450543
• ISBN 13: 9781611450545
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256