SOURCE: Gunn, Dan. “The Chosen Country.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4842 (19 January 1996): 11.

In the following review, Gunn compares Vassilis Alexakis's La langue maternelle with Makine's Le testament français, examining their place within French literature.

Both these prize-winning works [La langue maternelle, by Vassilis Alexakis and Le testament français, by Makine] purport to be novels, though they come on strongly, unashamedly indeed for the bulk of their length—and they are long—as memoirs, reminiscences, autobiographies. Both are by “foreigners” who have sought to escape their homelands into France, and who have written their tributes to their pays d'élection in French. The two novels chart, then, the workings of memory transplanted to foreign soil and fertilized by foreign customs, syntax and vocabulary. Both teem with fascinating recollections finely reproduced: of France, the author's mother, and Greece, in the case of La langue maternelle (which jointly won the...