SOURCE: Emck, Katy. “Russian Dreams.” New Statesman 126, no. 4355 (10 October 1997): 46.

In the following review, Emck argues Le testament français “is a novel of charm and feeling,” but is not deserving of the high levels of literary hype it received.

Novels about growing up court two different extremes. They can be reverential, nostalgic and sentimental. Or they can be comic, exaggerated and cute. A classic example of the comic, worm's-eye mode is Dickens in Great Expectations. At the other extreme there's Proust, with his reverence for the past and his endlessly fine discriminations of feeling.

Andrei Makine, a Russian who writes in French about the love of things French, goes the way of Proust. His novel [Le testament français] is fascinated by the mechanism of memory and has something of Proust's lush lyricism but little of his genius. It has been received ecstatically in France, perhaps because Makine's...