'With matchless delicacy and economy, Makine chronicles a talented musician's victimization by the Stalinist purges of the WWII years ... in scarcely 70 pages, Makine presents a movingly detailed history of survival, adaption and bitter disillusionment ... [it is] perfectly conceived and controlled. Its graceful narrative skilfully blends summarized action with powerfully evocative images charged with strong understated emotion. A masterly dramatization of "the disconcerting simplicity with which broken lives are lived."' -- Kirkus Reviews 'Makine here is as good as Stendhal - or Tolstoy ... a marvellous book, beautifully translated ... I've read it now four times and each time found more in it. With each reading it seems better, richer, deeper. On the surface it's simple and beautiful as an autumn morning. So it delights at first reading. But nobody who cares about literature and good writing, nobody who believes that imaginative literature tells us more than any factual work can do, will be content with that first reading ... Makine is storyteller, teacher, and enchanter most of all. I would rather read him than anyone else now writing, and then reread him. I think this is his best book so far.' -- Allan Massie, Literary Review 'Makine's novellas are short in length but beautifully paced and filled with a lyricism that weaves reality and fantasy into a far bigger picture. Little wonder, then, that he's frequently likened to other Russian greats such as Nabokov and Chekhov ... an engrossing story of love, tragedy, betrayal and loss. Moving the plot forward effortlessly, he creates a mythic portrait of Communist Russia.' -- Scotsman Andrei Makine's latest novel brilliantly depicts the utter desperation it often took to survive the Stalin years. The philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, a refugee in Munich, coined the phrase 'homo sovieticus' to define the character of the subjects of the USSR. The gist of this character lay in its willingness to accept whatever happened, and yet go on surviving. The description of this mass of 'homo sovieticus' waiting with infinite patience, without animation or complaint, is memorable, brilliantly done. This is in a sense an image of [the narrator's] life, spent feeling its way among a cluster of twisting and turning tracks under the snow.His revolt has been pushed to the limit. He has become, as Makine said in an interview, "simply his soul, naked under the sky". In becoming that, he has transcended 'homo sovieticus', or escaped the category, and his terrible story may be read as a victory. This is a marvellous book, beautifully translated by Geoffrey Strachan. He writes of the "disconcerting simplicity with which broken lives are lived", and an elusive haunting melody sounds in the background beyond the wreckage. -- Allan Massie, The Scotsman 'When I describe Andrei Makine as a great writer, this is no journalistic exaggeration but my wholly sincere estimate of a man of prodigious gifts. In his combination of clarity, concision, tenderness and elegiac lyricism, he is the heir to Ivan Bunin, the first Russian ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.' -- Francis King, Spectator 'A story whose telling has been set in motion by an accidental encounter is itself made up of such encounters, reflecting what Alexei comes to think of as "the disorderly torrent of life." But it is Makine's special gift to distill these events into images ... Apt and unforgettable, these images form a progression that has the cumulative force of music. Geoffrey Strachan's strong and graceful translation of a novel written in French manages to let its Russian soul shine through. "A Life's Music" exchanges the lushness of Makine's earlier work ... for the fiercer pleasures of concise storytelling. This is Makine's art; and it is, as the Soviets feared, subversive. His rendering does not impose order on Alexei's life so much as it cuts away that life's obscuring clutter.' -- Ann Harleman, New York Times 'Through the small generosities and personal sacrifices of individual characters, Andrei Makine manages to extricate a message of hope in a novel that subtly lessens the gap between desire and disappointment.' -- Punch online 'A Life's Music covers an extraordinary amount of ground. It stretches across many years and takes on mighty themes without straining. No contemporary writer has distilled the essence of the Soviet Communism as skilfully as Andrei Makine and, in the poignant fable about Homo sovieticus - the phrase coined by the philosopher Alexander Zinoviev - he again cuts to the heart of the issues involved.' -- The Sunday Telegraph 20021103 '[Makine's language is that of tragic romanticism - all blue dusks, lost dreams and constant yearning ... A Life's Music again proves Makine to be a very fine craftsman.' -- Times Play 20021026 'Makine is a brilliant storyteller ... Both powerful and graceful, [A Life's Music] has far more depth and scope than one might expect.' -- Scotland on Sunday 20021020 'Makine is an expertly understated writer ... the pianist's story itself [is] plainly written and yet full of the resonances of suppressed music' -- Alex Clark, Sunday Times 20021117 'This English translation is superb: lyrical, moving, intense, vivid, terse, atmospheric, and with never a word out of place. Makine has gone for depth rather than length, and Sceptre are to be congratulated for bringing out his novella as a seperate volume - thus securing for it the prominence it deserves. One advantage or brevity - having read it for the purposes of this review, I will start to read it for a second time, almost immediately. Then go out to get hold of his six previous novels.' -- Sunday Herald 20021117 'A masterly novella.' -- Paul Bailey, Independent 20021117 'Beautiful and poignant... a book to keep and treasure.' -- The Good Book Guide 20030101 'Both an unbelievable and an all-too-familiar wartime account of a young boy's life destroyed when his parents disappear in Stalinist Russia ... [Makine] possesses the ease of Chekhov, slight echoes of the great W.G Sebald and a limpid allure all his own ... a major European writer blessed with a profound grasp of history and its impact on the individual ... In many ways a spare, rather oblique tale of shifts, shadows and the half-spoken, it defies its compressed novella length. Indeed, the achievement of what is a characteristically exquisite piece is that the old man's long distant experience is so intensely felt that the reader forgets all about the narrator ... Here is a haunting performance as assured and self-contained as a Chopin nocturne - to be enjoyed and remembered.' -- Eileen Battersby, Irish Times 20030101 'Makine here is as good as Stendhal - or Tolstoy ... [he is] storyteller, teacher, and enchanter most of all. I would rather read him than anyone else now writing, and then reread him. I think this is his best book so far.' -- Allan Massie, Literary Review 'Beautifully paced and filled with a lyricism that weaves reality and fantasy into a far bigger picture ... engrossing' -- Scotsman 'With matchless delicacy and economy ... Makine presents a movingly detailed history of survival, adaption and bitter disillusionment ... perfectly conceived and controlled. Its graceful narrative skilfully blends summarized action with powerfully evocative images charged with strong understated emotion ... masterly' -- Kirkus Reviews '[An] elegant, heart-rending little gem of a work ... entirely fresh and necessary. Highly recommended.' -- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (New York) 'Makine's lovely lyric writing - excellently translated - in which the scenes are imagined with a sharply cinematic focus, gives it considerable depth and focus; the quiet ending ... is wrenching.' -- Publishers Weekly This is a marvellous book, beautifully translated by Geoffrey Strachan. He writes of the "disconcerting simplicity with which broken lives are lived", and an elusive haunting melody sounds in the background beyond the wreckage. -- Allan Massie, The Scotsman 'Geoffrey Strachan's strong and graceful translation of a novel written in French manages to let its Russian soul shine through. "A Life's Music" exchanges the lushness of Makine's earlier work ... for the fiercer pleasures of concise storytelling. This is Makine's art' -- Ann Harleman, New York Times 'Proves Makine to be a very fine craftsman' -- James Hopkin, The Times 'No contemporary writer has distilled the essence of the Soviet Communism as skilfully as Andrei Makine.' -- The Sunday Telegraph 20021103 'A masterpiece ... both a page-turning adventure story and a parable. It has a universality that goes far beyond Russia as a police state and an artist forced to deny his art ... profoundly disturbing and deeply compassionate.' -- The Sunday Herald 20021027 'This year brought a number of good works of fiction. It also brought one great one ... At the close, one feels that one had read not a novella but an epic.' -- Francis King, Spectator Books of the Year 20021027 'The subtle horrors of a totalitarian state are rendered with rare delicacy.' -- The Sunday Telegraph 20021103 'A homage to the resilience of the human spirit.' -- The Sunday Telegraph 20021103 'Two marvellous books this year had me shouting with joy at man's ability to triumph over adversity ... A masterpiece, a novella to be read in a lunch hour and remembered for ever ... as poignant as it is bleak, but again sadness and loss are redeemed by magical story-telling, the poetry of the writing and Makine's compassion for his fellow men' -- Jilly Cooper, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 20021103 'Masterly' -- Paul Bailey, Independent Books of the Year 20021103
Alexei Berg's father is a well-known dramatist and his mother an opera singer, but in late 1930s Russia both parents suffer constant suspicion and harrassment under Stalin's reign of terror. So great is Alexei's musical talent that he is allowed to continue his studies, but two days before his first concert in May 1941, he arrives home to find his parents being arrested. He flees, abandoning his budding career as a concert pianist, and assumes the identity of a dead Russian conscript to fight against the advancing Germans. When the war is over he stays on as a general's driver, continuing to keep his real identity hidden until a moment of folly reveals the truth and earns him 10 years in a prison camp. But despite a life of misfortune, Alexei remains unbroken, and in a snowbound railway station in the middle of the Urals, he tells his story.
