SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. “Marche Slave.” Washington Post Book World (18 August 2002): 13.

In the following review, Birkerts assesses what he believes to be some of the faults of Makine's Music of a Life.

In this era of hybrid literary adventurism, Russian émigré Andrei Makine, author of the highly acclaimed Dreams of My Russian Youth (1997)—itself a work that shaded eerily between novel and memoir—now brings us a novella that grafts upon the tradition of the traveler's tale something of the sensibility of Borgesian modernism, with its beguiling play of doubles and transposed identities.

Music of a Life (translated with graceful precision from the French by Geoffrey Strachan) opens in a snowbound railway station somewhere in the Urals, where an unnamed, somberly reflective narrator awaits the train that will take him to Moscow. Panning his detached gaze over the huddled bodies of his fellow travelers, tracking negotiations between a local...