Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most moving and profound book I've read in 20 years., 17 Sep 1998
By A Customer
What a marvelous, marvelous book. For those without the time or patience to read Remembrance of Things Past, "Dreams" provides the same evocative, dreamlike magic that Proust has provided generations of readers.For one who spent his formative years in Paris in the early '50s and who spent time in Russia toward the end of the Gorbachov era, this book resonated in nearly every sentence. I could feel and smell old Parisian haunts and back streets in St. Petersburg or in villages in the Caucaucus. Charlotte Lemonnier will live as one of the great characters in 20th century literature, and the narrator takes his place beside Marcel in "Remembrance" and Stephen in "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." Upon finishing this book for the first time, I immediately turned back to page one and started all over. After a two month layoff, I'm now reading it yet again. Like a Vermeer painting or a Beethoven string quartet, this book justifies frequent renewed visits. Truly a great work of art.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A man's journey through memory via story to literature, 25 Sep 1998
By A Customer
On the surface, this is a simple story of a Russian boy growing up in a fantasy world, the details of which are provided by his French grandmother Charlotte. With her sewing on her lap, she spins stories of her Parisian youth, triggered by photographs and newspaper cuttings kept in an an old 'Siberian' suitcase. As a child, he is fascinated by this vividly-remembered world, a misty Atlantis, but as the novel unfolds, we realise the narrator is on a self-imposed alchemical quest. His task is to rework these memories told as stories into a form that is acceptable as literature, with nods to Proust, Chekhov and Knut Hamsun. Indeed, in the final part of the book, he finds his work on sale in a bookshop. We first follow Charlotte's journey through snow and ice, storm and flood, revolution and rape, then the writer's attempts to capture this magic in words, and of course he realises that "the essential is unsayable" and yet "the unsayable is essential." However, via increasingly intense moments of wonder, or as James Joyce would say, epiphanies, he experiences, for example, a vivid street-scene in Paris in 1910, and 'becomes' the three women in an old photo. Each event in Charlotte's life - and consequently his own - is a moment in time which may be lost forever unless it is vividly recalled and told to another, just as was done in the ancient story-telling tradition, before writing arrived. Makine's attempt to show us that literature is "perpetual amazement" is a success; the prose is certainly haunting, even poetic in places. Although this is an excellent translation, I suspect that the French language of the original allows for many more nuances and subtleties of meaning. Yes, perhaps the plot's a little corny and we know sometimes what's around the corner, but the resonance of the characters, the spirit of place and the sense of time unfolding and looping (as in Charlotte's needle-work) more than compensates. But it is worth noting that audiences of old knew full well the beginning and end of the story they were being told; the value lay in the manner of the telling.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely spectacular!, 28 Oct 1998
By A Customer
Dreams of my Russian Summers is easily the best I have read since One Hundred Years of Solitude, which it in no way resembles. Although the reviews stress the author's debt to Proust, for reasons that are self-evident when you read the book, as I read it I kept thinking of Aleksandr Pushkin, the Russian national poet, an artist who tried to balance the ideals he learned from French literature with the Russian reality he lived in. Makine's prose is dense but readable, a trick that is difficult to pull off at best, and gives the reader an almost tangible feel for both the Russia the narrator lives in and the imaginary France that he creates out of his grandmother's stories. A must read, and definitely a must read again, to massively paraphrase Gide.
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