Russian Dreams
[In the following review, Emck argues Le testament français “is a novel of charm and feeling,” but is not deserving of the high levels of literary hype it received.]
Novels about growing up court two different extremes. They can be reverential, nostalgic and sentimental. Or they can be comic, exaggerated and cute. A classic example of the comic, worm's-eye mode is Dickens in Great Expectations. At the other extreme there's Proust, with his reverence for the past and his endlessly fine discriminations of feeling.
Andrei Makine, a Russian who writes in French about the love of things French, goes the way of Proust. His novel [Le testament français] is fascinated by the mechanism of memory and has something of Proust's lush lyricism but little of his genius. It has been received ecstatically in France, perhaps because Makine's Slavic sentiment and Proustian content recall the great days of the French novel and provide relief from the aridities of post-Robbe-Grillet post-modernism.
It is in essence a history of Russia this century, filtered through the reminiscences of Charlotte, a Siberian woman who has endured the hardship of the Revolution and of Stalinism but who tells her grandson romantic tales of the France where she grew up. As a child of the dour Soviet Russia of the 1950s, Charlotte's grandson hungers after this glittering land. His imaginary world is a collage of “classic images”: of the president Félix Fauré dying in the arms of his mistress; of a banquet held for Tsar Nicholas in which mysterious and sumptuous-sounding foods such as “bartavels and ortolans” were served; of cafes and boulevards and chestnuts in blossom.
The novel opens with a tribute to the way French women pout for photographs—as the camera flashes, they seem to be saying “pe-tite-pomme”. However, like the novel itself, this image is a bit coy. We learn a great deal about the narrator's sentimentality about things French but little about his actual life. It's like having icing but no cake.
There is a lot of set-piece memorialising. “One day, returning from a walk, we were surprised by a shower of rain,” says the narrator. They dive for shelter under a porch and his grandmother sets off: “It was another shower of rain that led me to discover an inscription engraved on a damp wall of a house in the Allée des Arbalétriers in Paris …”
Makine is making a point about the compensations of “French sentimentality” in the face of harsh Russian reality. Gradually, colourful Gallic tales give way to tales of Russia after the Revolution and the first world war: of mad people roaming the steppes, cannibalism in Volga villages, famine and rape. Gradually the narrator comes to see Charlotte's tales as “sad bravado” and to relinquish his own Francophiliac escapism.
Makine himself grew up with that peculiarly Russian notion that France represents the essence of European culture. He, too, had an epic grandmother and, like the narrator of his book, came to Paris in the era of glasnost to match the dream with reality. Though he slept rough in Père Lachaise cemetery, and survived on a baguette a day, he ended up writing a novel about the glories of Frenchness.
It is a touching tale and I imagine that the French of the original has lyric simplicity and old-fashioned grace. However, the English translation is an uncomfortable graft on to Makine's style, with the author's 19th-century emotionalism coming off as ponderous, imprecise and at times banal. “By now she knew that this life, despite its pain, could be lived, that one must travel through it slowly; passing from the sunset to the penetrating odour of the stalks; from the infinite calm of the plain to the singing of a bird lost in the sky, yes, going from the sky to that deep reflection of it …” Prose that is meant to be hypnotic ends up sounding twee.
Le testament français is a novel of charm and feeling, but it hardly merits all the high-literary hype it has received.
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