But with age – Makine is 41 – he has come to appreciate the great democratic
But with age – Makine is 41 – he has come to appreciate the great democratic possibilities of being bilingual “Monolingualism produces a totalitarian vision of the world This object is called a book and that’s it. Whereas the bilingual child, faced with one object with two names, will have to grapple with abstract and philosophical ideas early on in life.”Certainly, Makine has taken great creative impetus from being a Russian in France, at home only in his little district of Montmartre. And he is coy about the extent to which his books are autobiographical, feeling reluctant, as he puts it, “to stifle either of the Siamese twins that are me and my writing by defining too closely where one ends and the other begins”. But the section that rings truest in Le Testament Francais records the innumerable little ways in which the adolescent narrator suffered for being different from his Soviet contemporaries.
In the romanticised France of her memory, meanwhile, “whose rivers flowed like lines of verse, whose women wept in alexandrines and whose men quarrelled in broadsides,” it is possible for the president himself to die in the arms of his mistress.Russians are troubled not only by what Makine writes about his homeland, but also by his lack of loyalty to it. And the decision to write in the language of the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy and literary elite perhaps rankles with those raised in the Soviet Union. It was the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky who described exile as a kind of death, and Russians traditionally pine for the motherland when they travel. She walked half way across the country before washing up alone, with only her memories, in a tower block on the edge of the steppe. A drab, grey, spiritually impoverished monotony is contrasted with the civilised pleasures of belle epoque France, where Charlotte grew up. In the course of her life in the Soviet Union, Charlotte endured rape by an Uzbek, terrible hunger, and the arrest of her husband. And the dismal quality of the subsequent translation, which – typically for the cash-starved Russian publishing industry – was undertaken by two different translators and not supervised by Makine, did not help.But one does not have to penetrate too deeply into the novel to realise why the Russians have not embraced their errant literary prodigy.
The novel holds up a brutally frank mirror to Soviet society, and few Russians will like what they see. It describes the Soviet life of his French grandmother Charlotte Lemonnier. Suddenly, everyone wanted to read his book.After a lunch with President Jacques Chirac, all the obstacles standing between Makine and French citizenship magically evaporated. Two suitcases full of fan mail, some letters stretching to 20 pages, testify to the fact that many of Makine’s million French readers were sufficiently moved by his love song to French culture to want to communicate with him directly.
And Le Testament Francais has not been successful only in France. Translated into 30 languages, the book has been well received all round the world. Shortly before Christmas, Makine came to London to attend the presentation of the TLS-Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize to his English translator, Geoffrey Strachan. The fact that Moncrieff, the original translator of Makine’s beloved Marcel Proust, endowed the award simply added to the pleasure.However, the one place where Makine’s largely autobiographical novel about growing up in Russia has not travelled well is Russia itself. When news of Makine’s French success reached Moscow, commentators, such as the lead critic of Commersant Daily, were inclined to damn it, sight unseen, as “cliched and sentimental”. A distinguished French publisher rang to say that she loved his fourth novel, Le Testament Francais She published it, to positive reviews, in 1995. The book was showing all the signs of being a modestly successful novel by an unknown author when Makine was catapulted into a different league.
