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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN January 16, 2005 Issue 
Dreams of My Russian Summers By Andrei Makine Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2005 
Move Over, Proust - Here is 'Russian Summers' Our memories slumber beneath the surface of our daily lives, resonating in every occurrence, book, movie, or casual conversation we may encounter in our daily routine. Like Proust, we return to the past time and again, perhaps to validate our lives or simply to make sense of the past so that we can move forward. But our memories are also illusory and fool us into assuming that they represent the past accurately. How things happened is often entirely different from how we remember them. "Dreams of My Russian Summers" by Andrei Makine resonated with me because it is a story about growing up in the Soviet Union during a time that coincides partially with the time I was growing up in communist Bulgaria. I would have read it even if it hadn't been critically acclaimed or compared to Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." In fact, I found the writing style a bit verbose and over the top, something I would not have tolerated in another book. But here, I accepted this excess of pathos, simply as a uniquely Slavic way of expression. The ornate Byzantine prose brought to mind conversations I had heard in Bulgaria. People really did talk like this, with extravagance of feeling, verging on the theatrical. Written in French by a Russian political émigré, "Dreams of My Russian Summers" received the two most coveted and prestigious literary prizes in France - the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis. In the U.S., it has been honored as a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Although the disclaimer says that the book's "names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination," the reader senses that the novel comes out of the author's personal experiences. The fiction form however, gives him a poetic license to embellish and present his memories as if emerging from a dream, without a chronological sequence. The narrator of the book reconstructs his family's history by stringing together bits and pieces of the memories told to him and his sister by their maternal French grandmother, Charlotte. An accident of fate places Charlotte in a small town on the edge of the Siberian steppes. It is "a town where living meant endlessly reliving one's past, even while at the same time mechanically performing routine tasks." It is there that the grandchildren visit Charlotte every summer. It is there that in order to fill the languid, endless Siberian summer days, she introduces them to French literature and French culture. It is there that she recalls episodes of her life. Occasionally she pulls old newspaper clippings out of her "Siberian suitcase." These episodes, articles and fades photos evoke the carnage and horrors of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, Stalin's purges, World War II. Through these episodes we also glimpse life in the Soviet Union. When Charlotte marries, her Russian husband makes it clear to her "that a frontier more impenetrable than any known mountain range...would arise now between her French life and their life. He tried to find the words to express what would soon seem so natural: the iron curtain." But Charlotte lifts a corner of the iron curtain for her grandchildren when she opens up for them the world of French, i.e., Western bourgeois culture. The flowery Byzantine prose illuminates the narrator's inner world and sensitive nature while he is, as the contemporary saying goes, trying to find himself. Twenty years later, on the eve of the death of the Soviet Union, the narrator is making the last dissident broadcast to Russia from a German city. We knew," he remembers, "that it was not just a radio station that was disappearing but our era itself. All that we had said, written, thought, fought against, defended, all that we had loved, detested, feared - all those things belonged to that era." Eventually he goes to Paris. There he becomes obsessed with memories of Charlotte anew. He wants to bring her back home to France. He prepares for her homecoming with the feverish attention to detail of an anxious bridegroom. The coup d'eclat at the end of the book surprises the narrator more than it surprises the readers. For he is too consumed by analysis of his memories to notice the clues lurking beneath them. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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