SOURCE: Green, Peter. “The Piano Man.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (18 August 2002): 4.

In the following review, Green questions why a reader would want to read about the Stalinist era in Russia in Makine's Music of a Life.

Reading novels, good or bad, about the grimy puritanism and murderous paranoia of the Stalinist era in Soviet Russia is rather like being stuck at a party with a man who insists on giving you a blow-by-blow account of his wife's losing battle with cancer while confined in a mental hospital. You feel natural sympathy, but you wish to God you were anywhere else. As the writer Compton Mackenzie remarked, when asked, toward the end of World War I, if he'd seen D. H. Lawrence's “Look! We Have Come Through!,” a cycle of love poems addressing the wartime tribulations of Lawrence and his wife Frieda: “I'm very glad they've come through...