Dreams Of My Russian Summers (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
On a flower-covered balcony, cooled by Siberia’s dusty summer breezes, a grandmother tells stories to her grandson, the narrator, and granddaughter. But she is not just any grandmother, nor are these just any times. The grandmother is a Frenchwoman and these are the 1960s in the Soviet Union. Yet on that balcony, the USSR disappears and the children are immersed in another reality—the reality of memories of things and worlds past. They speak in French, and the language, the words, become part of the magic, incantations for summoning mood and memory.The choice of events was more or less subjective. Their sequence was chiefly governed by our feverish desire to know, by our random questions…for us the exact chronology mattered little! Time in Atlantis knew only the marvelous simultaneity of the present.…still in this present, which never passed away, we came upon a quiet little bistro, the name of which Charlotte spelled out to us, smilingly, as she recalled it: Au Ratafia de Neuilly. “This ratafia,” she would elaborate, “the patron served it in silver scallop dishes…."We were discovering that a meal, yes, the simple intake of food, could become a theatrical production, a liturgy, an art....In truth, we were beginning to lose our heads: the Louvre; Le Cid at the Comédie-Française; the deputies in a boat; and the comet; and the chandeliers, falling one after the other; and the Niagara of wines; and the president’s last embrace…And the frogs disturbed in their winter sleep! We were up against a people with a fabulous multiplicity of sentiments, attitudes, and viewpoints, as well as manners of speaking, creating, and loving.Behind the glittering, shifting, ever-present, never-changing France-Atlantis, Charlotte holds other memories at bay and these the narrator learns only indirectly, eavesdropping on adult conversations over the winter, as his parents and their friends and relatives gather to smoke and drink vodka and talk of the Frenchwoman who chose to live alone in Siberia. These darker, winter stories coalesce into another narrative in which Charlotte cares for the wounded of the Great War; lives through the horrors of the famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union; the constant hunger kept at bay with watery soup made from dried plants—or worse things, of which Charlotte knows, but does not partake; the last train for the east amid German bombing; and the ‘wrong’ suitcase—the one that holds memories, clippings of old newspapers, not biscuits. Only the narrator and his grandmother emerge fully shaped from the shining fragments of memory, and only Charlotte is likable. But the sense of places and times are vivid, even in broken pieces, like the Beaux-Art cherubs knocked off Charlotte’s balcony by Soviet workmen eager to erase the decadent past. One of the cherubs shatters in a thousand pieces on the sidewalk below, but the second of the pair lands in a bed of dahlias and is rescued and preserved by the children.In the book’s third section, the narrator is entering adolescence and feels somehow an alien in his own being (as most adolescents do at times). Estranged from his French self he finds himself drawn to the Russian side of his identity and as he does so the tone and tempo of the book, even the sentence structure changes becoming for a time simpler and more linear.For at last I was coming back to life. Living in the happy simplicity of orderly actions: shooting, marching in file, eating millet kasha from aluminum mess tins. Letting oneself be carried along in a collective movement directed by others, by those who knew the supreme objective, who generously relieved us of all the burden of responsibility, making us light, transparent, clear.And then comes a crisis, a first awkward encounter with a girl, and the narrator flees from his embarrassment—runs away to Charlotte to stand with her again on the balcony, talk of poetry and find, in one last summer with her, a calm center for his soul. Even in that summer's terrible moments—a scene in which we encounter a group of quadruple amputees—Charlotte seems to have a gift for finding and bestowing peace. Now at last we learn the narrator’s name, Alyosha. In Charlotte’s presence, “All at once I saw! Or rather I felt, with all my being, the luminous tie that linked this moment full of iridescent reflections to other moments I had inhabited in the past…Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun….A planet where the death of this woman with her big grey eyes became inconceivable.”In truth, I wish the book had ended with that summer, for Alyosha without Charlotte is not an easy person to be with--solitary, self-absorbed, and often incoherent. In the book's fourth section, some 20 years later, Alyosha has been living in the west, on the edge of destitution and perhaps insanity, and finds his way to Paris. His only moments of clarity come from memories of Charlotte and her Paris life, and from the hope that he might bring her to live with him. These final 30 pages contain a couple of interesting twists, but I think the story would have been stronger without them.Three and a half stars, rounded up because I loved Charlotte. This is not a book that everyone will enjoy nor is it without flaws; it is too fragmented and often rather too full of itself and its literary antecedents (mostly Proust, it would seem). Yet I am very glad to have met Charlotte and to have glimpsed, in tiny glittering shards, her many lives and worlds.Content rating PG for two brief sexual encounters (not particularly graphic) and several wartime and Soviet era scenes of very graphic horror.
“Dreams of My Russian Summers” by Andreï Makine is a fictional, semi-autobiographical book. The book was originally written in French and has won several awards.The book is told from a first person narrative. The book opens when the narrator, who is also the author, flips through old photographs which belonged to his grandmother. Soon the grandmother walks in and starts to reminisce about the photos.The story continues to explore the grandmother’s life as well as the narrator’s life and how her stories influenced him.“Dreams of My Russian Summers” by Andreï Makine is a beautiful book, a lyrical and relatable story of the author who was born in Russia but spent his summers with his grandmother Charlotte Lemonnier. Charlotte’s stories took a life of their own and ultimately became an integral part of the author as well.The book is as much the story of Charlotte as it is of the author. Born in the early 1900s, she moved to Russia with her father who practiced medicine. Over the years Charlotte went back and forth only to be in France on the even of World War I. She soon returned to Russia with the Red Cross during the revolution. Charlotte stayed in Russia and is beared witness to the horrors of war, starvation, famine, political murders, industrialization and finally the fall of the country’s leaders.Andreï visit his grandmother in a small Siberian town where she buried her Russian husband. Even though she accepts her destiny in Russia, she still holds a nostalgic place in her heart for France.I can certainly appreciate the beauty and craftsmanship of the author’s tale. Everything that had to do with the grandmother is pure gold, the images concrete, and she lived an admirable, if difficult life. But the other parts of the book lost me especially the last section. I couldn’t decide if the book crossed the line from “artistic” to “pompous”, I’ll go with “artistic” because I feel that was the intention.It’s too bad I’m not able to read it in the original French, especially since the author had to invent a French translator because the book publishers simply didn’t believe a Russian author could have such mastery of their language.This book won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, first time for a book to win both at once. The translation by Geoffrey Strachan is both attractive and captures (I hope) the style and colors of the story.For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
What do You think about Dreams Of My Russian Summers (1998)?
There is an English version that is also called: Le Testament Francais. Having read it - and giving it five stars, my only full marks for a book so far - I'm now trying the French version.It is an extraordinarily beautiful book and I understand why it won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis. It spans a decade of Russian history with such amazing subtlety, while at the same time weaving in the personal story of the narrator discovering France and the French language through the eyes of his French grandmother Charlotte. It explores all the facets of the human condition - from childhood, adolescence to old age - and also brilliantly describes individuals who are 'between cultures and languages', living on the sidelines and never really fitting in any country or community.
—Liesl Louw-Vaudran
Мислех, че акцентът ще е върху френската баба, живяла в Сибир, но мен повече ме развълнува вътрешната драма на внука (самия автор), разкъсан между две тотално различни нации - руската и френската, като естественият контраст между двете е засилен допълнително през годините на комунизма, създал пропасти между народи, между хора от едно семейство, видоизменил цели поколения... Струва ми се, че да си французин (по произход или възпитание) е нещо незаличимо, но да си руснак (дори не стопроцентов) е просто орис...
—Кремена Михайлова
The Goncourt prize in France seems to be drawn to Russian writers who can write French better than many French natives.In 1938 it was awarded to Henri Troyat (né Lev Aslanovitch Tarasov) for his L’Araigne. He later became a Member of L’Académie Française. In 1956 and again in 1975 it was awarded to Romain Gary (né Roman Kacew). And more recently, in 1995, André Makine (a.k.a. Gabriel Osmonde) received this prestigious prize.Had Nabokov been the son not of an Anglophile but of a Francophile, we would probably have another example.Le Testament français is my first novel by Makine. It is also his first novel. I am grateful to Fionnuala who drew it to my attention.This book is autobiographical in a roundabout way since it is in the narration of his own early life that the narrator focuses on the account of someone else’s life, the life of his grandmother. And it is in so doing that the narrator can eventually find himself.This book has appealed to me in many ways. First and foremost there is its language. Le testament is one of those books that leave a taste in your mouth because its language is so beautiful that you want to detain its words for a little while longer and savor them. The tale is that Makine, when seeking to publish his work in France, had to invent a fictional translator because editors could not believe that such splendid writing in French could be authored by a foreigner.The second appeal is that ever since I read in my teens, and reread later on, Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Forunier, I have developed a weakness for stories narrated by a young person in the French provinces and taking place either just before WWI or during the interwar period. They embody for me, fully, the meaning of the word nostalgia, even if this perfect nostalgia is extraneous to me since neither the period nor the geography belong to my lived experiences.And finally there is the added theme of the mixed nationalities as a determinant in the formation of the self. These correspond to two countries standing at opposite cultural poles, and yet with many historical links. The young narrator is torn between the dreamed France with its scenes of sophisticated and exquisite Salons and cultural cafés or delicious countryside, and the tangible and rough Russia in the process of transforming itself into a Stalinist state, with its harsh scenes of severe poverty, disturbing cruelty and inhospitable steppes.In this search for the self through the memories of someone else, the young narrator will try to collect cues from all possible sources and gradually finish the puzzle of his existence, even if some of these hints insist, like it so often happens with old photographs, to remain stubbornly mute.Le testament français is a cherishable read and I recommended it to any lovers of Proust. Not only is Marcel Proust mentioned twice in the novel as the epitome of the dreamed refined Paris, but the Proustian themes of memories and self searching are consciously explored here again. This time they are given the new element of the divergent pull from both the Russian and French cultures. It is as if this novel were a deliberate tribute to Proust and his French writing, as felt by a Russian soul.Wonderful.-------It has been translated into English (truly)as Dreams of My Russian Summers. It is noteworthy that they have chosen the other cultural pole, the Russian not the French, for the English title. I find that this translated title is too prosaic and has lost the evocative power of the original. I hope the rest of the translation has captured the original lyrical tone.
—Kalliope
