This book won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. (1995, 1997). This is the fictional story of a young Russian boy and his sister, who visit their grandmother every summer. Grandmother Charlotte lives on the edge of the Siberian steppe. Charlotte reads to her grandchildren, anything she can get her hands on: old newspaper articles, magazines, etc. She also goes through family pictures by the hours. Her goal is to overwhelm them with a love for French culture. It was unclear to me, how the family ended up in Russia. With the death of the grandmother also comes the death of what the young man considers "civilized and graceful" France. The young boy is the narrator of the story and remains nameless, except for two episodes in the story; once when his school friends call him "Frantsuz", the Russian word for Frenchman and once his grandmother utters the name "Alyosha."

A second story line revolves around the harshness of the Stalinist regime and how often brutal choices had to be made to stay alive.

I'm not ready to say if the book is pretentious or more Proust-like. Time and perhaps a re-reading will answer that question. I understand this is book one in a series, but I've been unable to substantiate that.

It's interesting to note that the author was a Russian school teacher who participated in a teacher exchange program and was sent to France, where he defected. 256 pages ( )

This fellow knows how to write. His words have a certain "terrior" to them. ( )

Siendo aún niño, adivine que esa sonrisa tan singular representaba para toda mujer una extraña pequeña victoria....

Thought this was a beautiful book...about an adolescent (for most of the book) navigating being French and Russian, how language and culture color his perspective, set against the backdrop of 20th century history.

I suspect Grace would like this book very much... ( )

Le Testament Français was published in the US as Dreams of My Russian Summers, but UK publishers retained its French title even in translated editions. It was the first book ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, and it became a bestseller in France and elsewhere. I picked it up from Brotherhood Books in 2014 because in my 2011-2012 Year of Russian Reading I'd read Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man (La vie d'un homme inconnu). And so I knew Le Testament Français would be a fine book, and it is. As the blurb on the back of this edition says:

Once in a while, there comes a book that captivates critics and public alike. Andreï Makine's autobiographical novel is such a book... Its subtle blend of memory and imagination is reminiscent of Proust... But in its broad sweep and mystical vision, Le Testament Français belongs to the tradition of the 19th century Russian novelists. (Independent on Sunday, date & reviewer's name not provided).

Famously, Makine was born in Russia in 1957, fled the Soviet Union for France in 1987, where he slept rough for a while and struggled to have his writing accepted as authentic because publishers thought a Russian couldn't possibly write so well in French. Since they didn't think it was his own work, he pretended to have translated it, and that's how this beautiful novel eventually came to be published.

It's a coming-of-age novel, one in which the conflicted soul of a young Muscovite eventually reconciles his love of all things French with a love of his homeland, Russia. As a boy he inhabits two parallel universes: the Soviet Union under Stalin, and a dream-world, an Atlantis derived from the stories of his French grandmother who lives in Saranza in Siberia, where he goes for the school holidays.

Charlotte had fled there in the exodus from Moscow in WW2, and never left it. She was notified twice of her husband Fyodor's death during the war, and was finally reunited with him long afterwards but he died within a year. Under Stalin they had been persecuted as foreigners and even after many years in Saranza she is still regarded as an outsider, and only the woman who delivers the milk feels at ease with her.

But this information about Charlotte's life comes only in fragments. The boy learns some of it from Charlotte's stories and some of it from the 'Siberian suitcase', a suitcase of newspaper clippings and photos that Charlotte, in her haste to escape the bombing, grabbed by mistake instead of the case of clothes and food for the journey to the east. But the stories that entrance the boy are stories of Tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra, of their glamourous presence at the Paris Opera, of magnificent ten-course meals with exotic ingredients like bartavels and ortolans garnished with truffles, and of seeing Proust in the park at Neuilly. The boy and his sister live in this alternate world, speaking French fluently in the holidays and Russian during their more prosaic days at school in Moscow, among classmates who mock him for his dreamy, bookish ways.

The power of this wondrous world wanes as he get older.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/22/le-testament-francais-by-andrei-makine-trans... ( )