SOURCE: Merlin, Lara. Review of Once upon the River Love, by Andreï Makine. World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (winter 2000): 116.

In the following review, Merlin asserts that the main topic of Once upon the River Love is the relationship between the East and West.

In Andreï Makine's Once upon the River Love, three teenage boys in Siberia fall in love with the West in the person of the French film actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. Traveling the twenty miles by snowshoe to the closest theater a full seventeen times, each boy sees in his hero a model of what he wants to be, what will enable him to escape the dogmatism of Cold War ideology.

Makine's rapturously received autobiographical first novel, published in English as Dreams of My Russian Summers, questioned the nature of cultural belonging through its one-quarter French hero growing up in Siberia during the Cold War. This second novel...