Breathless

When Andrei Makine’s “Dreams of My Russian Summers” was published in America last year, it met with well-deserved acclaim. In these pages, Thomas McGonigle called it “one of the great autobiographical novels of this century.” Now, in 1998, we have Makine’s “Once Upon the River Love,” but its European copyright, 1996, is a year earlier than “Russian Summers,’ ” and in many ways it reads like a rough draft of that “great autobiographical book.”

“Russian Summers” concerned a sensitive young Russian boy who spends his summers in an obscure village at the edge of the Steppes--along with his sister--in the company of his French grandmother, a woman who changes him from a rough bear cub into an introspective man whose knowledge spans both Russian and European worlds. It’s full of lush Proustian echoes and nuances about the enchantments of memory. “Once Upon the River Love” is the story of a sensitive young Russian boy who spends his early life--along with two friends--in an obscure village in the Siberian taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads all across that great land). The narrator comes under the influence of an older woman whose knowledge of France and the days before the Iron Curtain fell gives him a knowledge that spans two worlds.

The differences between the books are in their scope and ambition. “Russian Summers” covers almost the entire century and the whole histories of Russia and France. “River Love” examines the years just before and perhaps a decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union, as it might have been perceived in the furthest Siberian outpost. Also, it spans hell’s own amount of time dithering about Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Out in this Siberian village in the middle of nowhere, three boys grow up as close friends. There’s Samurai, who has a warlike temperament; Utkin, who was badly maimed as a child and yearns to be a poet; and finally D’mitri, the narrator, whose preoccupation in life will be love, although he doesn’t know it yet. The village is defined by several things--the timber industry, a dreadful prison camp nearby, a railroad that cuts through this enormous country from its European borders in the west to the shores of the Pacific in the east and its truly astonishing cold, unspeakable in its ferocity, which, nevertheless, must once a year yield to the demands of summer, the fascination and possible destruction of thaw. (The political situation, of course, in microcosm.)

Early scenes in the icebound village are splendid, heartfelt, gorgeous, weird. The insides of ancient log cabins, lonely little dinner parties attended by widows and a marvelous tour de force in which D’mitri and Samurai take a sauna in a deserted rustic bathhouse--all are beautifully written. Even when the narrator loses his virginity to a “great, faded” prostitute who looks and acts like every other disappointing prostitute who’s ever turned up in a coming-of-age novel, the reader stays with him because why not? He can be forgiven for it. What shows off a sensitive young man to advantage better than an aging, sluggish whore?

Then Western culture deals this frozen world a blow. In the closest town, 19 miles away through impenetrable forest, a motion picture house replaces its usual Communist fare with a Belmondo movie. It hits the frozen taiga the way “A Hard Day’s Night” hit stultified mid-’60s America. The three boys see it--even though they must walk on snowshoes through impenetrable drifts--a total of 17 times.

That’s where this novel takes a depressing turn. Makine unwinds miles of prose about Belmondo: “He embodied this whole complex repertoire of adventures, colors, passionate embraces, roars, leaps, kisses, breaking waves, musky scents, brushes with death. He was the key to this magic universe, its fulcrum, its engine. Its god.” Close to 10 pages later, he’s still going on about Belmondo, but words begin to fail him: “He arrived at the moment when the discontinuity between the promised future and our own present was on the brink of making us irremediably schizophrenic. . . . When Belmondo took Siberia by storm, all that was part of it. The Kremlin. . . . Vodka as the sole means to combat the schizophrenic rupture between the future and the present.” Belmondo, remember, was a cute French movie star, no more, no less, and it can be argued, because of “Breathless,” that he reminds us of unfortunate excesses of the Western political scene.

In any case, hasn’t Makine blurred the boundaries of politics and art? To live life in an obscure hellhole without any viable dreams is not necessarily a function of Communist rule. And to make a piece of popular (or high) art is not necessarily a function of “democracy,” a function of the snazzy, updated culture of the West. Living in an obscure village anywhere can be pretty one-dimensional; that’s why restless people under every sort of political rule head out to big cities. Makine--or the narrator, I suppose--is talking about replacing a worn-out myth for a more engaging one. But do myth and reality ever unite satisfactorily in our lives?

The whole problem with movies is that you can see them as many times as you like, but you never get to go live in them. The three Siberian village boys leave their “obscure” beginnings and travel to the civilization Belmondo’s films have promised: Samurai dies a tragic soldier’s death, and Utkin, the would-be poet, lives a disappointing life in Brighton Beach, composing porno comic books. So much for dreams of the magical West.

And the hero? The sensitive hero whose knowledge spans two worlds? D’mitri is left pondering the mysteries of the taiga, the prison camp, the great faded prostitute and the fateful train that cuts through one way of living into another. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. But if you’re going to construct a symbolic schema on which to weave your story, you’re going to be far better off working with Marcel Proust than with Jean-Paul Belmondo.