Synopses & Reviews
With this novel, Andreï Makine, whose work has been compared to that of Chekhov and Proust, brings to a stunning conclusion the epic trilogy that began with
Dreams of My Russian Summers.
A love story. A brief encounter, set in the gutted, burning Stalingrad in May 1942. Earlier, Jacques Dorme, a French fighter pilot had been shot down in a dog fight against the German invaders of France in June 1940. Made prisoner and sent east to a POW camp, Dorme escapes and makes his way through a devastated Russia where, ultimately, he joins a Russian squadron. At Stalingrad, Dorme meets and falls madly in love with a nurse, also French. Amid the ruins, their love blossoms, cut short by Dormes departure for Siberia, where he ferries American planes brought in from Alaska for the Soviet Air Force. Crossing the polar sky on New Years Eve 1944, Dorme, in a heroic move to save his fellow pilots, crashes into an ice-covered peak.
Several decades later, the narrator, a Russian exiled in France, a war orphan haunted by his dark childhood and obsessively searching for his roots, travels back to his native land, where he discovers how his life and that of Jacques Dorme are inextricably intertwined.
Review
"Limpid...Makine handles this moving storys tricky time shifts expertly, and...creates satisfyingly complex images....Nobody surpasses Makine as a maker of stunning visuals....His generations Chekhov and its Proust." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"At once shocking and revelatory...Makine lets his characters tell their own tales his authorial touch is so light that his presence is nearly forgotten. Perhaps more important, he observes with great sensitivity that who his characters become is born of their immediate world." Book Forum
Review
"This novel sings, as a solitary soul reinvents his life, dreaming it awake and simultaneously creating a fiction that rescues the reader from all earthly powers." Providence Journal
Review
"Curiously insecure and self-indulgent, this is not a work that affords much novelistic pleasure. It is to be hoped that we are seeing here a Makine template being exorcised and banished forever." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Makine's unfettered romanticism is refreshing; set against an artfully drawn yet stark backdrop of war, Communist brutality, hunger and death, it seems both stronger and more beautiful." New York Times