SOURCE: Knorr, Katherine. “Andreï Makine's Poetics of Nostalgia.” New Criterion 14, no. 7 (March 1996): 32-6.

In the following essay, Knorr assesses Makine's work and its place within contemporary French literature.

French book prizes get more attention when there is a story attached. The book isn't the thing; the author must have a legend. Thus we had Marguerite Duras boasting that L'Amant was all a true story, or the prize winner who turned out to be a salesman in a newspaper kiosk.

The story was better than usual this time when both the Médicis and Goncourt prizes were won by Andreï Makine, an impecunious Russian living in a one-room apartment in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. He had been rejected by a number of publishing houses until he pretended that he wrote not in French but in Russian and that he was translated. He had applied for French citizenship and been turned...