SOURCE: Phipps, Sam. “Recounting the Cost.” Spectator 287, no. 9030 (1 September 2001): 35.

In the following review, Phipps lauds Makine's treatment of subject matter in Requiem for the East.

Andreï Makine has been compared to Nabokov, Chekhov, Proust. Far from flattering him, such plaudits barely begin to do him justice. It's true that some of his qualities—economy of language, fascination with memory and the past—do bring other writers to mind, but Makine, who has lived in France since defecting from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, has rare talents and a unique voice.

Makine writes in French, not Russian. His last novel to be translated into English, Confessions of a Lapsed Standard-Bearer, was a brief, exquisite evocation of childhood in the postwar USSR. Not only did it its narrator Alyosha totally convince as a young boy who rebels after gradually awakening to the falseness of the system around him...