A Life’s Music

A very short novel that contains multitudes. A young Russian composer flees Moscow, heading for Ukraine, desperate to escape Stalin's purge of intellectuals in 1941. Then Russia's war with Nazi Germany begins and his life turns upside down. How will he survive? What means and reserves of character does he have at his disposal? Profound, moving, haunting - full of resonances that are even more valid in today's fraught times. A mini-masterpiece.

A masterpiece . . . a novella to be read in a lunch hour and remembered for ever

Andreï Makine's work has elicited laudatory comparisons with Nabokov, Chekhov, even Proust . . . what Makine distinctively brings to his tale is an impressive eye for detail, good enough for the reader to suspend disbelief and accept the artifice of the story within a story: and he is particularly adept at recapturing the dreamlike nature of memory, the way in which it can distort and preserve, and include the tiniest detail while omitting huge swaths of the action. The economy and precision of his writing are crucial here, and just as important are the virtues of Geoffrey Strachan's clear and thoughtful translation.

When I describe Andrei Makine as a great writer, this is no journalistic exaggeration but my wholly sincere estimate of a man of prodigious gifts. In his combination of clarity, concision, tenderness and elegiac lyricism, he is the heir to Ivan Bunin, the first Russian ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The first remarkable thing about A Life's Music is that, though so short, it tells the reader so much both about its central character, Alexei, in particular, and about Homo sovieticus in general - of whom Alexei is so tragic, valiant and lucky an example

A Life's Music exchanges the lushness of Makine's earlier work . . . for the fiercer pleasures of concise storytelling. This is Makine's art

A Life's Music covers an extraordinary amount of ground. It stretches across many years and takes on mighty themes without straining . . . a homage to the resilience of the human spirit . . . this exquisite, poignant novella is one of his most satisfying works

An unforgettable testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit

Makine is an expertly understated writer . . . plainly written and yet full of the resonances of suppressed music

A masterly novella

In little more than one hundred pages Makine succeeds not only in condensing the life and loves of one man, but in capturing the fear that pervaded everyday life in Stalin's Soviet Union. It is the perfect riposte to anyone who believes that great Russian literature must be unwieldy and crammed with a cast of thousands