It is difficult to imagine more beguiling circumstances than those surrounding the literary output of André Makine. Born in Siberia, raised on an offshoot of the Volga, he applied for political asylum in France during a trip to Paris in 1987. Shortly afterwards he took up the staggering challenge of writing prose in his adopted language.
His first novel, passages of which had been produced on benches during a period when he was sleeping rough in various Parisian parks, was roundly rejected by incredulous French publishers. Finally he managed to pass it off as the translation of a nonexistent book by a fictitious Russian novelist.
This quixotic determination paid off with his breakthrough fourth novel. Le Testament Français, a dense, poetic evocation of childhood on the Steppes, earned some astonishing rave reviews ("as though Chekhov was writing in French" screamed Elle). The book went on to become the unprecedented winner of two of France's most prestigious awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médi cis, and also managed to shift more than a million copies in France alone.
However, while the author's mercurial linguistic prowess may be suggestive of genius, there is still precious little evidence that Makine will ever advance into the ranks of such legendary literary chameleons as Nabokov or Brodsky. There can be few doubts that Le Testament Français is overall a beautifully written book, and that its treatment of Russian civil war hardships, in particular, is evocative and powerful. But far too often the narrative sinks into woolly, poetic stasis and its central character displays a disturbingly sycophantic Francophile sensibility (which may explain some of the sales figures).
Makine's follow-up, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, begins in a more robust and promising fashion with an absorbing description of a possible murder scene: the weed-tangled corpse of an old White Army officer lying naked by a rural French riverbank. Sitting alongside it is the book's heroine, Princess Arbyelina, bare-breasted and motionless.
In a wistful, meandering extended flashback, we are then served up scraps of the princess's past. These include her privileged Russian childhood, her rape by a Red Army soldier and her vaguely comical rescue by a gun-toting Georgian aristocrat who manages to kill the rapist in mid-penetration.
Soon after, the novel takes a preposterous lurch towards absurdity as we learn the adolescent prince has begun drugging his mother and co-joining with her insensate body by night. This is the real crime of the book - and sadly it isn't rescued by a glaringly obvious final twist.
The ability to produce credible literature outside the secure boundaries of a writer's native language has always been regarded as a phenomenal gift - from Conrad's first tales of the Congo to Beckett's monochrome French word play. In Makine's case, just beware that this brilliance doesn't bore you to death.
