Friday, March 4, 2016

The mysterious Mr. Makine elected to the French Academy – The Point

Andrei Makine, born September 10, 1957 in Siberia, arrived in France at the age of 30 with his degree in Philology, so little is known … other than his books. The writer cultivates its mystery while being more crowned. The French Testament , his most autobiographical novel published in 1995 (Mercure de France), won him both the Goncourt and Prix Médicis; and the following year, the French nationality dreamed that his country had hitherto refused. Makine has piercing eyes, which made way mirror for one who seeks to fathom it. It is the right look of a soldier defending the literature with the intransigence it requires in his eyes, even displeasing.

Makine comeback. He had to win many battles, the publishers refused to publish his first novels, doubting that Russian writing directly in French ( The daughter of a hero of the Soviet Union, Laffont, 1990 Confessions of a flagship fallen, Belfond, 1992), until he uses cunning: do believe translated from Russian by some Lemonnier, after its french ancestor who settled in Siberia at the end of the nineteenth. Hence this presence, from the age of 3 years, the French language learned from Charlotte, the grandmother of the Wills .



Allers and returns between two cultures

Nearly fifteen novels later Makine remains loyal not so much to his publishers in its back and forth between his two cultures, and the memories of each: his penultimate novel, a woman loved (Seuil, 2013), discusses the figure of Catherine II. And the last ( The Land of lieutenant Schreiber, Grasset) paid tribute to Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber, brother of the journalist, and unsung hero of World War II resistance which Makine has repeatedly of justice. History lives this ambassador of French literature abroad who, like many French authors, continues since montmartrois haven to travel the world following its many translations, away from the bustle of the hexagonal literary community. The suit will go so well. Who in his play Le Monde selon Gabriel (The Rock, 2007) – Gabriel Osmonde is his pseudonym – denounced the media cacophony that kills poet speech surely will with the sword passionate rigor he dedicated to his adopted language, and to the country to which he devoted an essay, this France that we forget to love, in 2006 (Flammarion).

The passion? It burns in the characters of these stories often romantic, lyrical and sometimes violent: If after Requiem in the East, All People Love has baffled his fervent readership, it is because he was powerfully the violence of the twentieth century by opening during the war in Angola. His narrator-writer assists in Africa to one of these conferences that may have held in Ouagadougou, where one lives Makine, back when he was a member of the Jury Prize of Five Continents de la Francophonie, to step. The writer has since left the jury. But find one of its members under the paneling: the marvelous nonagenarian René de Obaldia, another “francophone” Hong Kong native. In Russia dear to perpetual secretary Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the new Academician keeps his love, borne by another literary passion: Ivan Bunin, the Russian Nobel Prize (1933), recently brought to light potential as Just one the Nations. Andrei Makine devoted his thesis at the Sorbonne in 1991 under a title that suits them so well: “Poetics of nostalgia”

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