Dreams of My Russian Summers - Andrei Makine

I also knew that I should do my very best not to talk about books. And that we would talk about them all the same, a great deal, often till late at night. For the France that had appeared one day in the middle of the steppes of Saranze owed its birth to books. It was indeed essentially a bookish country, a country of composed of words, whose rivers flowed like the lines of verse, whose women wept in alexandrines and whose men quarreled in broadsides. That was how we discovered France as children, through its literary life, its verbal substance, shaped into a sonnet and honed by an author. Our family mythology attested that a little volume with a battered cover and a tarnished gilt top traveled with Charlotte on all her journeys. As the last link with France. Or perhaps as the constant possibility of magic....We confused France with her literature. And true literature was that magic, a word, a verse, a chapter of which transported us into a changeless moment of beauty.

A lush, poetic book which is a true pleasure to read. Each paragraph is crafted like a poem, each chapter like a book unto itself. The author beautifully contrasts France, where his grandmother grew up, and Russia where the author and she lived most her life. While it is easy for anyone to reflect on the stark contrasts between a remote Russian village and Paris, it is difficult to imagine a writer doing it so deeply and thoughtfully. He contrasts the inner experiences of the two places that makes the reader pause to let the experience reverberate inside.

The book is a love story of French life as well as a grandson for his exotic grandmother. Coming of age with the two contrasting cultures leads to a compassionate understanding of life. This is a book I imagine reading again, for like a good poem, it is too powerful to fully absorb once through.