SOURCE: Dallas, Lucy. “The Bitterness of Exile.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5030 (27 August 1999): 24.

In the following review, Dallas contends that Makine sensitively handles the topic of incest in The Crime of Olga Arbyelina.

Andreï Makine is a Russian émigré writer with an extremely glamorous life story; he was born in Siberia, studied in Moscow, taught philology in Novgorod, and then fled to Paris to seek political asylum in 1987. In his early years there, he slept in a cemetery while writing his first book, which he had to pretend was translated by a bona fide Frenchman, since nobody would believe that a Russian could write such good French. He has mastered not only the language but also the idiom; his books feel French rather than Russian, slightly old-fashioned and very carefully written. His third novel, Le testament français, was largely autobiographical and wholly beautiful, and it won both of...