SOURCE: Champagne, Roland A. Review of La musique d'une vie, by Andreï Makine. World Literature Today 75, no. 2 (spring 2001): 354.

In the following review, Champagne asserts that La musique d'une vie functions as part of a modern Russian folklore that extends beyond Russia.

Andreï Makine received the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis in 1995 for his novel Le testament français. Six works later, Makine's Siberian origins continue to enrich his storytelling skills to awaken the Russian past for readers of French. The enchanting novel La musique d'une vie begins when the narrator embarks on a train voyage from a small Siberian village to Moscow in the early 1970s. He meets the elderly Andreï Berg, a piano player who never realized his promise to be a professional pianist. Instead, Berg explains what happened to his career, taking us back to 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine. He pretended to be...