SOURCE: Hunt, Laird. Review of Music of a Life, by Andreï Makine. Review of Contemporary Fiction 23, no. 1 (spring 2003): 138.

In the following review, Hunt praises Music of a Life as a powerful and epic novel.

Andreï Makine's powerful new novel opens in a provincial train station in the middle of a snowstorm. There, an unnamed narrator finds himself stranded amid a sea of fellow travelers, whose collective patience in the face of a long and unpleasant delay seems a microcosm of the Soviet condition. The principal story that Makine unfolds in the pages that follow is the tale, told to the narrator, of one of these travelers—one of these constituent elements of homo sovieticus, in Alexander Zinoviev's phrase—but it might stand for many a life derailed by Stalin's purges. Alexis Berg, promising young pianist, his parents arrested and soon to be exiled, finds himself forced to flee...