[pipitous]

In 1989 Andrei Makine, a Soviet ?migr? who for the previous two years had been living in Paris, wrote a novel, in French, set in the Soviet Union. Makine?s novel, his first to be published (with a few years yet to go before the coup d?etat he?d ring with his Le Testament Francais, published in English as Dreams of My Russian Summers), sets about debunking the myth of an ?open? USSR under Gorbechav and perestroika. In Makine?s novel, largely set in the 1980s, that decade is just another chapter in the dismal Russian 20th century, dressed up and with a bit of makeup hastily slapped on.

The book begins with the Hero lying in a frozen, corpse-strewn meadow in the third year of WWII. A few medical orderlies pick their way through. A young nurse?s shard of mirror shows that the man at her feet who seemed very much dead is in fact still breathing. He recovers, has a brief affair with the nurse, and is sent back to the front, where he survives and wins the Hero of the Soviet Union award for bravery. After the war he finds the nurse again, though she is now badly scarred by shrapnel; in a moment of pity he tells her that the scars don?t matter, they?ll marry anyway.

By the 1980s the award has worked some wonders for the couple?s sole surviving child. She has grown up beautiful, has been well-educated and learned a couple languages, and has a comfortable position in Moscow as translator for visiting businessmen. As she leaves them sleeping soundly in their drugged stupor on the bed she roots through their briefcases and reports her findings to her masters at the KGB. Meanwhile the father remains in the village where she grew up, drinking himself to death, mourning the death of his wife, and seemingly forgotten by his daughter.

Makine?s metaphor is that in a society so thoroughly bankrupt everyone?s a whore. In a country that so effectively crushes its citizens? humanity the only choices are to be ground underfoot or, for those with brains and talent, to be unquestioning lackeys in the service of the State. The daughter is beautiful, intelligent, talented, and completely untroubled by being a whore for the government so long as it gets her better rations. The father ? who could be usefully trotted out for parades when people still remembered the war ? is by the 1980s rotting away in a dingy apartment and begging liquor money from anyone he can. The only thing of value he has yet to pawn is his gold star for valor.

The novel is written with elegance and finesse, but Makine shows himself here and in the other novel of his I?ve read (A Life?s Music) a little too in love with clich?. In an interview he expressed admiration for the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, whose melancholy, nostalgic short stories were the last gasp of the great 19th century Russian tradition of quality. As far as literary admirations go you could do worse, as legions of second-rate Thomas Pynchon imitators have shown with deadening regularity. Bunin?s stories are very much a product of their era, and while they can be enjoyed for their particular gloomy beauty there is more than a touch of the antique about them: one cannot write an Ivan Bunin story today. Makine has a tendency to fall back overmuch on stock scenarios from wintry Russian novels of yesteryear: snow-laden scenes, miraculous battlefield survivals, a baby that dies of starvation moments before the father returns from the neighboring village with a full knapsack of bread and milk. Much of this plays more like a caricature of a Russian tragedy than anything genuinely, full-bloodedly tragic. The novel is continually fine without ever threatening greatness. Based on the two novels I?ve read Makine is a writer of real talent who needs to let go of his influences. I think, I hope, that he?s capable of a real Andrei Makine masterpiece.

[Vomephems]

I think i like clich? then,and i certainly loved Life's music.
Most of his book are based one the same line,and if you look for hard realisme(no napsack with bread and milk,things like that never happen!)i don't think you will find the Masterpiece you expect in the rest of his work.
He often play with exageration and exageration in the images he use for the dramatisation of his tales,call it cliche or caricature if you look for ridicule,i don't mind.I often find life carictural and some of what i witnessed, i would i called clich? before it happened to me.
Requiem for the east,my favorite, is stuffed full of them,and,along with his prose,it is what i loved in it.
I demand clich?,i need the unbelivable in books or life,and if it is well written it give you the joy for a moment to believe in it.And that is for me one of the great gift and pleasure of literature.
And to be honest to reproche a guy writing about Siberia to much "snow-laden scenes" is quite fair.
You might find a bucketload of clich? in Tolstoi War and peace,if you look for it.One can ridicule anything if he put his mind to it.