SOURCE: Wright, Barbara. “Charlotte Russe.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4912 (23 May 1997): 21.

In the following review, Wright praises Le testament français, lauding its juxtaposition of life in France and Russia.

Le testament français sent me back to Dr Zhivago, and I don't think the association is too outrageous. This autobiographical novel is told in the first person by a Russian boy painfully living through his adolescent years in the 1970s. He is bright, sensitive, independent-minded, and the constraints of the Soviet system magnify the normal torments of adolescence, until he finds them almost impossible to bear. And yet he is lucky; all through his childhood and youth, he is able to live a parallel life of the imagination, thanks to his extraordinary French grandmother, Charlotte, who lives in Siberia.

Andreï Makine is bilingual in Russian and French, and this is his fourth novel in French. In 1995, it deservedly...