FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews
The Life of an Unknown ManBy Andreï Makine, translated by
Geoffrey Strachan, Sceptre, 250pp. £16.99
A HALF-REMEMBERED love story by Chekhov begins to preoccupy Shutov, a middle-aged, rootless Russian writer, as he realises his relationship with a much younger, ambitious French girl is about to end. It’s not really even the story: it is a moment on a toboggan ride, as snowflakes begin to fall and the hero whispers “I love you” to the girl. Shutov is no Chekhov, and the ambitious Léa has begun to see him as a marginal figure on the French literary scene. She wants more. A random summons to appear on a television culture programme briefly reignites her interest in him, but it is over. She no longer needs the man who rescued her from poverty.
Makine’s 11th novel to appear in English, translated from the French, opens rather brutally, and continues through several layers of harsh realism. It is an angry novel, although much of the anger is filtered through Makine’s characteristic elegance. Shutov finds the programme an ordeal and is unable to deal with the performance quality all but one of the other guests bring to it. He feels awkward and is insufficiently slick for the presenter.
The final guest, however, an older woman devoid of tricks, appears to address him as she reads from her novel. "In fact," she says, "the book starts when it's all over for my heroine. I think that's how it is in our lives. When you expect nothing more, life opens up to what is really important." Shutov grasps what the woman writer is alluding to, but Léa dismisses her as ugly and irrelevant. His despair is divided between being a writer on the wane and a man about to be replaced. In one of their final arguments Léa attacks Shutov for his response to another Chekhov story, Vanka. "What shocks me is your lack of sensitivity," she announces. "You're Russian but that story is totally lost on you." It is then that Shutov says something that proves not only defining of him but also crucial to the entire novel: "I'm not Russian, Léa. I'm Soviet . . . Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about. Sorry." The girl moves out.
Recalling a love affair he had in his youth, Shutov, who grew up in an orphanage, is spurred on by nostalgia or, perhaps, desperation, and decides, after long years away, to pay a visit to Russia. The Leningrad in which he had been a student is gone. Instead he arrives into the carnival atmosphere of the tercentenary celebrations of St Petersburg. The new Russia of ultramaterialism is nodding to the old, but the Stalinist hell that existed in between has been airbrushed out. Shutov’s reunion with Yana, the lover from his youth, now a wealthy businesswoman too busy fashioning a luxury apartment out of several smaller units to indulge in reminiscence, never happens.
Instead he is waited on with some irony by Yana’s scheming porn-publisher son. There is a slight complication: an apparently silent, elderly man, Volsky, the remaining tenant of the old building, is still in his room, waiting to be transferred to a rest home in the suburbs. The son has been entrusted with his care, but he wants to see his girlfriend and asks Shutov to keep vigil. The old man begins to speak, and his story is that of millions of Russians.
At this point Makine returns to his enduring theme: the displacement caused by war. Volsky is a symbol of the Russian experience that then became the Soviet one. Before the German invasion he had been an aspiring singer. All that changed as bombs fell on Leningrad; the siege began, as did the starvation. Makine balances the agony inflicted by the Stalinist years with his revulsion at the excess under Putin when silver-bound 19th-century Russian classics became designer accessories. Volsky’s story is dramatic, and although his romance with Mila, another symbolic figure, does not convince, the idea of an undying love shared by gazing at the sky is appealing.
Makine left Russia and settled in Paris; he mastered French and writes only in it. Reading him in English means pushing through an extra layer of language; everything he writes is special. His novels possess an eerie beauty invariably capable of surpassing the polemic. At his finest, as in Requiem for the East(2000; translated 2001) and A Life's Music(2001; translated 2002), or his elegiac fourth novel, Le Testament Français, which won the Prix Goncourt and made him internationally famous, he brings grace to narrative.
If he has an artistic kindred spirit it is most probably the South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee. Both look to their countries while also drawing on character – in Coetzee’s case, increasingly his own. This time Makine has allowed history and the story of a nation to overwhelm his characters, yet in these symbolic types, Shutov included, as a Soviet looking for Russia and finding only the present-day version, the many faces of Russia surface.
Though not as artistically poised as his other novels, The Life of an Unknown Mandoes achieve the profundity of another of his more polemical narratives, his debut, A Hero's Daughter(1990, translated 2004). Yet if Volsky does not emerge as a character, he is a representative survivor, a lost soul. His experiences are compelling: "Among the prisoners he had met murderers without remorse and innocent people who spent their time reproaching themselves. Cowards, lapsed heroes, the suicidal . . . Thinkers, who perceived this place of labour and death as the result of a humanistic theory badly applied."
A tone of outrage shapes the narrative, but the abiding quality, yet again, is Makine’s insistent genius.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
