PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Born in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1957, Andrei Makine has lived in France since seeking asylum there in 1987. DAUGHTER OF A SOVIET HERO, his first novel, was originally published in French in 1990 and was followed by CONFESSIONS OF A LAPSED STANDARD BEARER and ONCE UPON THE RIVER LOVE. Then in 1995 his fourth novel, LE TESTAMENT FRANCAIS, became the unprecedented winner of both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Medicis and has gone on to sell over a million copies in France alone, and to be published in translation in twenty-nine countries. Its translation into English by Geoffrey Strachan, published by Sceptre in 1997, also won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Since then Andrei Makine has published THE CRIME OF OLGA ARBYELINA, REQUIEM FOR THE EAST and A LIFE'S MUSIC, published in France in 2001 where it won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire.
This is a beautiful and poignant novella, just over 100 pages in length, in which we hear the story of a man's life as told in a Moscow train compartment to a fellow passenger who discovered him playing the piano in the dark of a snowbound railway station. A budding concert pianist, he lost parents and future career through Stalin's purges. Abandoning his music, he steals a new identity and joins the fight against the Germans in the Second World War. He survives this bleak existence only to endure a humiliating reminder of what might have been, and an infatuation seals his ultimate fate. The scale of events and depth of emotional turmoil are in no way diminished by the size of this book. Although sparingly written, the tragedy of a destroyed life is magnified. It is also lit with tremendous hope: the old man is not embittered by what has been stolen from him and this has the effect of making the reader suffer on his behalf. The prejudice against intelligentsia, the horrors of war, the compassion of ordinary people, the cruelty of the privileged - you will be touched by it all. This is a book to keep and treasure. (Kirkus UK)
