Synopses & Reviews
They are virtual brothers, Arkady and Alyosha, young pioneers in Stalin's postwar world, marching to the clarion call of socialism, to the stirring beat of the drums. The future, they are assured, is bright and beautiful. But what, then, are those endless miles of barbed wire they encounter everywhere along their route?
This is the moving, two-generational tale of two families, those of Yakov Zinger and Pyotr Yevdokimov, fathers of the two young pioneers. Inseparable, the two men have been through the grueling war against the Germans, with all its horror and senseless carnage. Yakov—or Yasha, as he was known—emerged physically intact but scarred forever "from the moment he had been lifted out of a mountain of frozen bodies at a camp in liberated Poland.” Pyotr, a skilled sniper who operated behind the German lines, lost both his legs, not at the hands of the Germans, but as a result of an artillery "mistake" by his own forces. Together, in these postwar, Cold War years, the two families try to piece together their shattered lives.
Review
"
Makine is a master word painter. Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer . . . has the panoramic sweep of the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century." Sunday Telegraph
Review
"
Makine continues to earn the sky-high literary comparisons (Proust, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky) thrust upon him." Review of Contemporary Fiction
Synopsis
“Brilliant. . . . exquisitely wrought.”—The New York Times
Synopsis
“Brilliant. . . . exquisitely wrought.”—The New York Times
About the Author
Andrei Makine was born in Russia in 1958 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.