SOURCE: Merlin, Lara. Review of The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, by Andreï Makine. World Literature Today 74, no. 2 (spring 2000): 395.

In the following review, Merlin argues that the son's relationship to his mother in The Crime of Olga Arbyelina functions as an allegory for the relationship between Makine and Mother Russia.

Andreï Makine's highly praised semi-autobiographical novel Dreams of My Russian Summers (1997) recounted the tale of Siberian adolescent being raised by his French grandmother in the repressive years of the Cold War. His second novel, Once upon the River Love (1998), similarly depicts a Siberian orphan passionately in love with a prostitute and the French cinema. For both of these eager boys on the brink of adult sexuality, the idea behind Makine's newest work, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina—about a Russian mother who has sex with her fourteen-year-old son in France—would be a dream come true. Unfortunately, the reader...