Requiem for a Lost Empire
A Novel
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this remarkable novel, which spans eighty years of the twentieth century, Andreï Makine describes, beautifully but unsparingly, the almost uninterrupted succession of violence, misery, and horror that has been visited on the Russian people since the October Revolution of 1917. For those quick to forget, or too young to remember, he paints a graphic portrait of those years in a three-generational novel that is as moving as it is revealing.
A young Russian army doctor is sent to distant shores to bind the wounds of those in Africa, the Near East, and South America that are pawns in the global political chess game during the Cold War. Recruited by an intelligence agent, he experiences the bloody reality of revolution on the ground. The book casts its eye back toward his grandfather Nikolai, a Red cavalry soldier fighting the Whites in 1920, and his father, whose story of World War II is invoked with a passion and force that bear comparison to the best writing on the subject.
From the battlefields of the 1920s to the harsh African heat and dust of the desert in the 1980s, from the orphanage where the narrator spent his youth to the art galleries and chic salons of the glittering new West, Requiem for a Lost Empire has all the sweep and depth, all the beauty and insight of the great Russian novels. It is, as the eminent French critic Edmonde Charles-Roux noted, "an astonishing novel, one that will surely stand the test of time."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This luminous, beautifully crafted new novel by much-praised Russian migr author Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers, etc.) takes as its subject three generations of a Russian family, caught in the violent political struggles of the 20th century. The novel begins after the Russian revolution, when Pavel, a Russian farmer, refuses to comply with the demands of Stalin's government. The novel then jumps to late-20th-century Russia, where Pavel's son is swept into a murderous web of KGB espionage, falls in love and then loses his lover in the maelstrom of historical change. When he next hears of her, she has been murdered. The novel gradually becomes a tale of revenge, as the spy goes to Florida to find his lover's killer. The outcome, however, is not what he expects. Shortly after the novel introduces Pavel's son, we learn the story of Pavel's father, a deserter from the Red Army, followed by the story of Pavel himself. Each temporal leap the novel makes illuminates and defines its crucial events, rather than muddying the waters. Makine writes lyrically, baring his struggling characters' emotions and vivifying their oft-chaotic backdrops with equal brio. As the young spy's friends and family disappear from his life, his memories become the only things left for him; Makine renders these in brilliantly sharp detail. The arc of the novel shows, above all, that life patterns repeat themselves; we watch the same conflicts playing themselves out in the three life stories presented here. Throughout, Makine displays the sensitivity and honesty of his acclaimed previous works.
