SOURCE: Merlin, Lara. Review of Dreams of My Russian Summers, by Andreï Makine. World Literature Today 72, no. 2 (spring 1998): 339-40.

In the following review, Merlin posits that Dreams of My Russian Summers examines a person living under the influence of French and Russian cultures—and the impact the two conflicting systems create.

Surely culture is the most-contemplated category in literature and criticism today. In a trans-, multi-, inter-, high-, pop-, consumer-, and occasionally counter-cultural age, Andreï Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers (originally Le testament français, 1995) asks unusually provocative questions about the ways in which we inhabit cultures and what lives on in their interstices.

Makine's autobiographical novel relates the story of a boy with a French grandmother growing up in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, when anything foreign was automatically suspect. Raised to speak both French and Russian, he seeks to understand what it means...