Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

I first discovered the writer Andreï Makine in the pages of the TLS in 2000. It was a review of his novel, Once Upon the River Love. I remember the review intrigued me so much that I went straight to one of the big bookshops on London’s Charing Cross Road (Books, etc. – sadly now long gone) where I found and bought a copy. Just reading the first page I sensed there was something special about the way these words were crafted (and so ably translated, as are all Makine’s books, by Geoffrey Strachan). I was hooked. I went on to read his subsequent books, almost keeping pace at first, as each was translated into English. I began to see how certain themes recur in his novels. These seemed to give hints and clues, suggestive of the author’s own background. Indeed, Makine’s own story is as intriguing as his plotlines. Over the years, the interviews with him which I’ve read in newspapers and magazines tend to give very scant detail about this author and his life – reading them, it’s almost as if he is one of his own characters, so deftly yet sparingly sketched out. A loose yet fluid set of lines, roughing out the suggestion of a figure, lightly delineated on a blank white page. A form upon which we can overlay the contours of a character. Indeed, it seems all too easy for us to project something of our own imaginations as readers, conjuring up the picture of a man as exile, as a writer, as an artist.

The fact’s state: he was born in the USSR, in Krasnoyarsk in 1957. He was allowed by the Soviet authorities to come to Paris in 1987 as part of a teacher’s exchange programme, where – despite the thawing of the Cold War – he defected to the West. He was granted asylum. Lived rough for a while, including two weeks living in a cemetery. He settled in Paris, and has lived there ever since. Absolutely committed to a writer’s life. His major breakthrough came with the publication of his novel, Le Testament Français, in 1995. A novel which achieved the unprecedented feat of winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Writing in French prose so finely crafted he had to claim his books were translations from Russian originals in order to persuade his publishers that he’d actually written them himself. Before coming to France, in the Soviet Union he’d been a teacher. He’d also served in the Red Army, tank corps; posted to conflict zones in Angola and Afghanistan. He was an orphan, raised by his grandmother. Makine may well even be an adopted name; the grandmother perhaps not his grandmother after all. Such are the sketchy details, the bare bones of possible facts which seem to beg for elaboration. Facts that suggest so many questions, but how to sift through such layers so lightly laid down – they seem so thin, almost opaque, like the thin leaves of the thinnest onion-skin Bible paper. Not so much the whole truth, but rather nothing of the truth at all? – Less of a life’s testament than a palimpsest of speculation. Questions and echoes.

But perhaps the facts are all there? – Hiding in plain sight. After all, the themes which recur most frequently across his novels seem to echo those bare facts known of the author’s life. The grandmother who speaks French. Looking down the barrel of a tank gun in a conflict zone. An exiled writer seeking to reconnect with the past. Familiar tropes indeed. Albeit refracted in myriad ways which make the truth even harder to pin down. But then that’s the essence of all his stories right there. It’s not so much about the truth as more about the feeling. The reckoning with an unfathomable past. How the individual is lost in the immensity of history. Engulfed and overwhelmed, yet somehow surviving. Bobbing back up to the surface. Constantly. Carried along by the tidal flow of time and events. And eventually set down on the wayside of history to think, ponder and reflect on all of it. What it means, what matters, and, moreover, what doesn’t matter at all. Life isn’t lived in the details of history, but rather that’s where a life is lost. It’s only in the present resurfacing that through recollection some sort of sense can be made of it all. But even then, all those certainties unfathomed and arrived at can all be swept away again in the merest blink of an instant. After which, once emerged again; shot out from the other side of the welter, can we begin to recalibrate, realign, reset and remember from a different vantage point. Life is fluid. Unchanging in its ceaseless changeability. Like Heraclitus’ river.

Makine is often compared to other writers: To Proust. Tolstoy. Bonin. Chekov. Balzac. Stendal. Solzhenitsyn. But I tend to think this is simply a lazy journalistic take. He’s Russian; he writes in French. Perhaps at best though such comparisons are a means to attempt to signpost him, pointing as definitively as possible in the direction of truly great literature. The grand tradition of the Great Russian novel. A la recherché … and all that. Which is fine by me. I think Makine is probably one of our greatest living writers. But I think in time he will come to be seen as standing amidst this august company on his own terms. For the distinctiveness of his own voice and for the themes he chooses to explore and unpick that most clearly characterise our own era. In that sense I genuinely think he is one of the foremost writers of our times. And I say this because he captures our present preoccupation with the past so well. Such that he is capturing not just the zeitgeist of the present, but that he is doing so in a way which is refracting even within the rapidly changing nature of our times. When I began reading his works there was a sense of nostalgia mixed with a fascination for the incomprehensible. As a child growing up in the 1980s, at the tail end of the Cold War (not that we really knew it was the tail end at the time), the Second World War still didn’t seem all that long ago. It was still a living memory, as was the First World War even. But the world I knew, the world I was growing up in, seemed utterly removed from those two calamitous eras. Life was now infinitely better and improved. There was still a looming existential threat, nuclear holocaust and mutually assured destruction; but it all seemed so very far away. And as the thaw set in with the era of Glasnost and Perestroika everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The end of the decade only confirmed it. The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution (overlooking the inconvenient anomalies of Tiananmen Square and the former Yugoslavia) – the 1990s now seem like halcyon days, all taken so much for granted. Requiem for the East bridges this divide perfectly, yet it also manages to highlight the undercurrents which persist (largely unseen but there in plain sight) into the present day.

Now though such things are getting harder not to see. It feels like we’re stuck in a deracinating chaos of rising nationalism, xenophobia, gameshow politicians summoning up goose-stepping delusions towards a nostalgia for broken empires and far flung wars, domestic terrorism, austerity, minimum living wages, zero-hours contracts, food banks, gold-plated elevators, expense claim scandals relating to superfluous second homes with pay-as-you-go pornography, duck houses and moats. Brexit as tragedy, farce and folly. Remembrance Day charity campaigns in which children wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Future Soldier” emblazoned across the front parade holding giant plastic red poppies – Lest we Forget, and, Never Again … Lions led by Donkeys; twas ever thus, and, so it seems, still it is. Hollow words parroted for unthinking times. Hidden agendas parodied into reality. “Fake News” fabricating a new set of Emperor’s clothes to distract from a corrupt and greedy global system which somehow manages to sustain itself as one economy after another tanks itself. Third World Debt. First World Guilt. Climate Change Denial. We’re not waving, we’re drowning in the largest gyre of plastic waste ever recorded choking the oceans and being ingested in the very food we all eat and the water we drink. What the hell has happened to all our bright tomorrows? That happy future heralded by the chants of ‘Freiheit’ – ‘Freedom’ and the ‘wind of change’ which we heard sung of so loudly and optimistically in the 1990s? – Makine himself has spoken out against these First World delusions and the duplicity underlying them in perhaps the most public forum he could, when being inducted into the Académie Française in 2016.

When I first began reading Andreï Makine’s novels they appealed to me because I simply couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live through the horrors and deprivations of the two World Wars. What it must have been like to lead a life defined by duty and self-sacrifice. Even though I’d heard my grandparents telling their life stories, describing what it was really like. I could never properly picture what it would have been like had I had to live through it. The UK is unhealthily obsessed with this period – we were taught about it over and over at school, it’s on our television screens every night, either in documentaries (Dan Snow, Dan Snow, and more Dan Snow…), or sit-coms (think Dad’s Army, Allo Allo, Goodnight Sweetheart, etc.) – and this has been a constant since I was a child. Our Finest Hour. Never to be forgotten. And don’t you forget it! … But likewise, as a child of the Cold War, I was fascinated by what life might be like had I lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I vividly remember watching the parades of Soviet missile transporters passing through Moscow shown on the TV News. It was both chilling and beguiling. I later got a taste of what it might have been like when I stayed with a family in East Berlin in 1993. Makine’s novels give a window into that lost world of fear, labour camps, the KGB and Joseph Stalin forever looking over your shoulder and listening in on you. Of loyalties betrayed. The many veils of idealism and ideology. Naivety met by the bluntness suddenly emerging from the shadowy fog of reality. The deep lacerations of individual lives coerced, distorted, twisted and broken as so deftly described in A Hero’s Daughter.

His novels are often stories within stories. Not so much Russian dolls, but rather that strangely displaced schism of the mind – the here and now attempting to comprehend and contend with the past and its echoes. His novels always manage to expertly explore the place of the solitary human within that wider history, of the individual within that vast inhuman machinery of the State, and of States at war. Yet within this giant whirligig of time he manages to find small but universal anchors in the form of love, music, personal connection, links which lead ultimately to some form of redemption or reparation. The Life of an Unknown Man captures this perfectly. His novels can seem outwardly bleak but losing yourself within the sonorous nature of Makine’s prose they become transformative, and they somehow always manage to end on a profound note of hope and optimism. Nihilism has its silver linings. No matter how bad things become in the end the individual holds true. Hope shines through. Time is lost, but time is also regained even if it is reshaped – time and its recall remould us, reader and character, anew. This is the process and the point of indulging in or undertaking such strenuous meditations on the past. Experiencing the emotions of people other than ourselves. We know nothing if we don’t know what empathy truly is.

In that sense all Makine’s books are an homage to the indomitable spirit of ordinary souls who manage to remain unbroken by the malicious intent of the collective machine. The essential soul of all his characters ultimately survive and emerge unscathed. They represent a poetic homage to hope as the essential element of the human condition. And I hope, reading Makine, particularly in these troubled times; I hope that his books prove to be prescient and right. I still believe in that indomitable spirit of revolution which marked my teenage years so indelibly in the early 1990s – hence I hope our here and now is simply the story within a story that I will one day tell to my niece and nephews, and them to their children someday too. When the bright new tomorrows have eventually returned.