Once upon the River Love

Rating:
Summary: Encountering sex and art in a Siberian wasteland.
Review: In a callous and cold Siberian village, whose inhabitants' lives revolve around timber, prisoners, and gold, there is no room for romance and beauty. Makine tells the story of three young boys who are full of indiscernible longings, until a Belmondo film arrives at a nearby town and gives voice to all their dreams. In one of novel's most poignant chapters, Makine describes how each of the three boys sees a different hero on the cinema screen- for the hardened Samurai, it is Belmondo's feats of bravery; for the crippled Utkin, it is his stoicism in the face of lifelong disappointment; and for the poet Dmitri, it is the alluring Western world of beauty and sensuality. Makine brings powerful emotion to both Dmitri's sexual desire and his longing to experience the West. Perhaps more than any other author, Makine manages to find intense lyric beauty in this carnal desire, devoting pages to blurry visions of female flesh. But most of all, this masterfully crafted novel leaves the reader with an emotional and philosophical understanding of how a single work of art can forever change the course of three human lives.

Rating:
Summary: Mastery of prose
Review: Makine is a Russian-born author, who sought asylum in France at the age of 30. He is the first novelist to have received France's prestigious Prix Medices and Prix Goncouert for the same book. His perfect mastery of the French language is rooted on lessons received from his grandmother, and when presenting his writngs to the editors in France he had to pretend they were translations from Russian.

The coming of age for three boys in a remote village in Siberia is the main event around which this novel is structured. The trio, handsome Alyosha (the narrator), lamed Utkin, and strong minded Samurai, are all products of a secluded, narrow minded environment, where the only future perspectives are to work in the logging industry, the gold mines, or as a guard at a nearby gulag. In this world of no changes, in a land where romantic love had no place, of long winters, of boredom and lack of passions, the coming of a series of Belmondo movies will fuel their imagination and search for the unknown. The boys become seduced, fascinated by everything these films represent, the Western world and culture, freedom, love for the sake of love, and the beautiful sexy women. The effect is so strong that each one of the boys will eventually live out their own Belmondian fantasy. Uktkin as a writer, Samurai as a guerilla fighter, and the writer in the film industry.

Skilfully constructed and elegantly written, flamboyant style, sophisticated prose, sometimes overly elaborated. The reader will sometimes feel intoxicated with the language; Makine's descriptions of Siberian winters are at the same time exceedingly touching and repetitive. With a sexual overture, Andrei Makine carries his novel with a passionate prose, dreamy eroticism and powerful images.

This novel carries a universal theme in a provincial setting. In its deep psychological context, there is also the sociological aspect. The fascination "development" will play over "backwards" societies, the migration from the later to the first, and the emotional consequences upon those who dare face the change.

Rating:
Summary: Hypnotic
Review: Russian-born novelist Andrei Makine's romantic and Proustian autobiographical first novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, was quite appropriately written in French because its subject was largely the centuries-old love affair that Russians have had with French culture in all its forms. Set mostly in a grim, Stalinist Siberia, it charted a boy's intoxication with his grandmother's lustrous memories of turn-of-the-century Paris. That inheritance of lost treasures eventually caused him deep conflict, but Makine resolved it by becoming a writer.

And what a writer, even in translation. His prose in that book was a lavish, slow torrent, lush and haunting. Not surprisingly, Makine is the first novelist to have received France's prestigious Prix Medicis and Prix Goncourt for the same book.

His new novel, set in the 1960s, is equally as focused on dreams of glamor and glory contrasting with a dismal Siberian reality as crushingly onerous as the Soviet system that has planted prison camps there. And once again, it's aspects of French culture that come to symbolize everything fresh, exciting, and free that is missing in the narrator's life.

Reading this novel you enter a fascinating and quite alien world of snow, silence and history-as-nightmare, where blizzards cover towns with a weight that equals the burden of collectivization and the calamities of Russia's decades of devastation through Revolution, civil war, and war. In this setting, the brutal regularity of the winters is as heedlessly cruel as the inane Communist Party slogans and official optimism that ceaselessly forecast a glorious future proving the truth of Marxism- Leninism. But what about the barren here-and-now?

The handsome narrator Dimitri (nicknamed Don Juan) and his two eenaged friends struggle with all the familiar burdens of adolescence. Not surprisingly, Dimitri's first sexual encounter, with a prostitute whose life also affects his two friends, doesn't reveal the glories of love, but grotesque chagrin l'amour instead. It's Makine's rich prose that makes something original out of all the cliched inchoate longings for life, experience, certainty and identity. His prose--and the bitter, empty life in Dimitri's eastern Siberian town where people feel "condemned to this natural beauty, and to the suffering that it conceals."

Into that void shines an unexpected beam of light far grander than the Trans-Siberian Railway and its mysterious, magnetic passengers glimpsed through windows. Quixotically, the local cinema starts showing an adventure film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and everyone for miles around starts lining up to see this movie not once, but dozens of times. In its chic, humor, and self-reflectiveness, the film offers unimaginable gifts to its Siberian audience. They see the unknown West there: excitement, sensuality, freedom, adventure, wit and sparkling fun. Belmondo's gorgeous smile on the movie poser undercuts years of fear and oppression under the Soviet system. And each of the trio of boys ironically finds deep lessons in the frivolous movie, identifying with different aspects of Belmondo's character: Lover, Warrior, and Poet.

Though the book is touchingly beautiful, it doesn't have quite the weight of Dreams of My Russian Summers, perhaps because there's no central figure who commands as much fascination as the grandmother there. You wonder if this book might not have made a better novella with some of the lushness trimmed away. At times the book's intoxication with language (which is its major strength), can even feel a bit exasperating. As H.G. Wells described Henry James's later style, you feel you're watching an elephant trying to pick up a pea.

But that's only an occasional problem. Most of the time you're happily, dreamily swept away, which is poetically appropriate. For the name of the Siberian river near Dimitri's town is Amur, also a Russian name for Cupid. And in French, the River Amur is spelled "Amour," which of course means love.