SOURCE: Sooke, Alastair. “The Golden Age of Stalin.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5132 (10 August 2001): 20.

In the following review, Sooke provides a brief plot synopsis of Requiem for the East, praising the novel, and believing that readers will enjoy the work.

Andreï Makine's new novel, Requiem for the East, views twentieth-century Russia through the eyes of an anonymous secret agent addressing his (also nameless) former lover. He recalls successive wars, involving three generations of his family who have lived through a period of great political turmoil. Savage rapes and executions ensure a background jangle of brutality, as Makine memorializes the countless victims of this violent history with a dissonant music of “uncoordinated” gunshots, and the dying gasps of wounded men who sound as though they would “burst into song”. The melancholy tone, rendered by Geoffrey Strachan's sensitive translation, is full of the nostalgia that accompanies change, even if the past...