The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Music of a Life, by Andreï Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan
reviewed by Laird Hunt

Andreï Makine. Music of a Life. Trans. Geoffrey Strachan. Arcade, 2002. 109 pp. $19.95.

Andreï Makine’s powerful new novel opens in a provincial train station in the middle of a snowstorm. There, an unnamed narrator finds himself stranded amid a sea of fellow travelers, whose collective patience in the face of a long and unpleasant delay seems a microcosm of the Soviet condition. The principal story that Makine unfolds in the pages that follow is the tale, told to the narrator, of one of these travelers—one of these constituent elements of homo sovieticus, in Alexander Zinoviev’s phrase—but it might stand for many a life derailed by Stalin’s purges. Alexis Berg, promising young pianist, his parents arrested and soon to be exiled, finds himself forced to flee his home two days before his first public recital. World War II and the borrowed identity of a dead soldier provide a temporary but transformative cover for the young exile: he feels his way through the fog of love and betrayal that awaits him at war’s end with well-calloused hands. Berg’s story is tragic, but it is not unremittingly grim. As in all Makine’s writing (which once again has been beautifully translated by Geoffrey Strachan), even the darkest textures are shot through, at least fleetingly, with light, or as in this typically evocative moment, light and music: “[Berg] left the room, took a few steps along the corridor, had no desire to go farther. What he saw was enough for him. A deep blue velvet dress, the glow of fair hair, a right hand he could see when it slipped along towards the high notes. . . .” Makine is no stranger to the art of compression; his earlier novel, Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer, was a model of resonant concision. Still, if Confessions carried within its own slender frame the heart of a novel, Music of a Life, 109 pages of love, war, loss, and music, constitutes an epic.