Out of time and place

The misleadingly titled Life of an Unknown Man is in fact the story of two men, and the dualities that their characters embody — fame and anonymity, unhappiness and happiness, West and East.

The misleadingly titled Life of an Unknown Man is in fact the story of two men, and the dualities that their characters embody — fame and anonymity, unhappiness and happiness, West and East. Like Andrei Makine himself, the protagonist, Shutov, is a middle-aged Russian emigré author living in Paris. His powers, both sexual and literary, are slipping away from him, and his sense of failure is minutely and rather brilliantly dissected in a parade of petty humiliations, ridiculous outbursts and painful internal dialogue. Orphaned as a child and lonely in emigration, ‘for a long time Shutov had lived in the company of the faithful ghosts that are the creatures brought into being by writers’. Makine conveys compellingly how his compulsion to ironise, to seek metaphors and parallels — to approach life through a literary filter — has become a serious barrier to intimacy.