Le Testament Francais Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Le Testament Francais Book

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. Read More

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  • Product Description

    On the edge of the Siberian steppes, a young boy grows up listening to his French grandmother's stories of France just before the Great War - a nostalgic portrait of a vanished world, but a bewitching one during the Soviet regime. Gradually the story emerges of his grandmother's subsequent life in Russia, through the horrors of the revolution and World War II. Torn between two cultures, he eventually leaves after the fall of the Berlin Wall for Paris, and discovers how far his imagination led him from reality. But he stays, until a letter arrives containing an astonishing revelation.

  • 034068206X
  • 9780340682067
  • Andrei Makine
  • 16 October 1997
  • Sceptre
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 288
  • New Ed
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