At the beginning of Andreï Makine’s new novel we meet a young narrator in possession of some fairly bleak certainties. On the subject of love, he tells us that, once affection has been won,
the routine of a relationship, or of indifference, can take over. The other one’s mystery has been tamed. Their body reduced to a flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise … At this stage, in fact, a kind of murder occurs.
Whether or not one sympathises with such epic negativity, it is hard not to admire that casually brutal ‘or otherwise’. And yet the narrator himself is unhappy with his views. He is, he knows, the product of a place (dissident 1970s Leningrad) which instil such wearied hauteur in its young intelligentsia. He was formerly a member of a group of artists — the type who, he notes astutely, complain about state oppression while deriving their scant creative impetus solely from its existence.
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