SOURCE: Chamberlain, Lesley. “The End of the Affair.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 September 2001): 4.

In the following review, Chamberlain argues that Makine's Requiem for a Lost Empire is a thoroughly modern novel.

The Russian novelist Andreï Makine, who writes in French, finds that the joys and deceits of language, and the temptation of silence, dwell at the heart of Russia's extreme 20th century history. History and language seem to be Makine's themes. In his earlier novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, a Russian boy learned from his French grandmother her lovely musical language and found that escaping to a place where he could live with beauty became the point of his life.

Requiem for a Lost Empire attributes a similar history to Makine's nameless narrator. When, late in Stalin's era, the secret police came for his parents, this boy was snatched to safety by Sasha, a French woman...