Lead Review

• Book: Brief Loves that Live Forever
• Location: Russia
• Author: Andrei Makine

Makine, who writes in French, is an elegant stylist, though not always easy to read. Sentences that at first appear simple turn out to be sticky with ideas: hefty thoughts are compacted into sparse prose. And his range is as broad as his prose is tight. He conjures up the beauty of a Siberian winter, and places it alongside an ugly industrial state. Marvellous images jostle with soft conclusions: love, it seems – at least on the surface – is all. And yet Makine leaves us wondering whether the love that he appears to advocate is not as illusory as the white city of the future in which his young orphan once believed. – Gillian Slovo –

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