Shattered lives, lost love and silent truths

Like the President of the Russian Federation, the narrator of Andrei Makine's sixth novel has a past as a KGB spy in the outer reaches of the Soviet empire. Unlike Vladimir Putin, however, Makine's nameless hero is destined to disappear from historical record, to be rubbed out in a sun-drunk Florida beach town by another Russian spy turned American agent, as the "crushing empire cemented together by dreams and blood" that they once served finally "collapses in a cacophony of shattered lives".

In this end-of-history resort (named Destin, as the narrator notes with grim irony), the tanned bodies playing by the sea, all crude strength and smiling banality, seem to mock the aesthetic fantasies of Nazism and Stalinism by insouciantly fulfilling them. There is no place here for the darkness of memory. To speak the truth of his nation's history, the washed-up agent despairingly reflects, he "needed words that would have eclipsed the sun, obliterated the whiteness of the sand, stilted the shouts and the peals of laughter ..." And yet, in his progress towards Destin in search of the woman whom he has loved and lost in the murderous tangle of Cold War conflict, he becomes a channel of pure witness. His vanished beloved - a Soviet agent who still believes - had challenged him one night to "tell the truth" about their vanquished country. Confounded by the incomprehensibility of the "grotesque organism" of history, he answers by telling the story of three generations of his own family in the vulnerable, provisional form of a private confidence whispered in her ear.

Makine's Russian spy is an innocent-recording eye. As he roams in search of her, out of place and lost for words, through fashionable vernissages and cocktail parties in Berlin and Paris and besieged hotels in war-ravaged African cities, his imagination comes increasingly to inhabit the underground galleries of remembered images of fleeting loveliness and extreme atrocity that contain the essence of his own and his nation's unspeakable past. The dominant

metaphors and motifs in Requiem for the East are of dumbness and silence. During the Russian Civil War, the narrator's grandmother, then a young woman, is found by a deserted soldier, pregnant, buried up to her neck by a retreating army, her tongue cut out. As Russian troops liberate the Nazi concentration camps, a dying soldier - burdened with the name "Marelst? in a parental act of tribute to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - is seen reaching for his own jaw, blown away by shrapnel.

Speech appears rarely, always inadequate or foolish, only to be refuted by the silent truth of remembered moments: images of men and women engaged in small salvific actions and gestures of sacrificial generosity, sensuous glimpses of domestic ordering and practical love amid murder, demagoguery and chaos.

Makine's genius, made more evident with each strange and

compelling new novel that appears in English, is in his ability to tune narrative to the underlying harmonies in the cacophony of displaced and mutilated lives; to inhabit imaginatively the memories and desires of an incestuous aristocratic madwoman, or a crippled Siberian pornographer, or an out-of-service Soviet spy. The title of his most recent work, The Music of a Life, due to be published here next year, is apt for Makine's creative achievement as a whole. For it is through contemplating the "infinite singularity and troubling uniqueness? of shattered individual lives that this prodigiously gifted Russian novelist, who chooses to write in French, the language of his own displacement, creates a serene, redemptive music.