SOURCE: Thompson, Sam. “Derailed by History.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5202 (13 December 2002): 22.

In the following review, Thompson asserts that Makine makes the most of the novella form in A Life's Music.

Andreï Makine left his native Russia in 1987 after glasnost, and travelled to Paris, where he was initially homeless. He has now published seven highly acclaimed novels in French. Like the author's own story, A Life's Music is a tale of dispossession and survival. At a railway station in a remote part of the Soviet Union, the nameless narrator discovers an old man, Alexeï Berg, playing an abandoned piano; as they travel to Moscow together, Berg tells the story of his life. In 1941, he is a young man on the brink of a career as a concert pianist, but his family falls victim to one of Stalin's purges, and he becomes a fugitive. Assuming the identity of a dead...