Stranger in a strange land

BEING caught between two cultures often leaves one feeling more bereft than privileged. The narrator of Andrei Makine's superb if unsettling meditation Le Testament Francais, translated by Geoffrey Strachan (Sceptre, £16.99 in UK) is a Russian whose life and perceptions have been both shaped and heightened by the experiences of his French grandmother, Charlotte, whose memories and stories of Paris before the Great War initially open a special world for him and his sister. "To live alongside our grandmother was already to feel you were elsewhere."

Charlotte manages to retain her distance from the other Russian babushkas while sustaining cordial relations with them. Small gestures and comments, "far more than her clothes or her physique set her apart. She is a victim of war who has also managed to create her own world by evoking a France which becomes more real to her in Russia than it was when she was living there.

The daughter of French parents who travel to Siberia, where tragedy soon strikes, Charlotte comes to symbolise many things - most particularly courage, imagination, romance and even history itself. Everyday life appears to be all things Russian. But gradually, even that changes. For the narrator, his grandmother seems to become more real once he has seen a photograph of her as a tiny child.

Even more significant is the "little brown pebble known as `Verdun' " - in reality a "rough shell splinter" - which the children discover in their grand-mother's bag of secrets, a suitcase of newspaper cuttings and various tokens from her past. "All we saw was a handsome officer with a moustache emerging from the column of the victory parade, approaching a young woman squeezed tight in the midst of an enthusiastic crowd and offering her a little fragment of brown metal. . . " The existence of this secret lover further adds to her quality of difference.

Like its narrator, Makine's novel is poised between two contrasting cultures, but it is Proust's influence rather than Turgenev's tone which most dominates. Its precise physicality, lyric deliberation and celebration of memory gives the book an austerity which defies sentimentality. Not surprisingly, Charlotte even recalls seeing Proust; "we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the Boulevard Bineau."

Her power, though utterly benign, becomes almost frightening in its ability to reduce the boy to being an outsider in his own country. Her memories, which present the facts of history in a more human - as well as a more romantic - guise than school text books even affect the narrator's performance in history class. "One day... without being asked, I began to talk about Nicholas and Alexandra and their visit to Paris. My intervention was so unexpected and the biographical details so abundant that the teacher seemed taken aback. Snorts of amazement went around the classroom: the rest of the class did not know whether to regard my speech as an act of provocation or as a simple fit of delirium."

The teacher intervenes, reminding the class: "it was the Tsar who was responsible for the terrible catastrophe at Khodynka Field thousands of people trampled to death. It was he who gave the order to open fire on the peaceful demonstration of 9 January 1905 - hundreds of victims. . . " Yet the narrator, aware of the facts, is not disputing the official version of history. He merely finds himself seduced by his grandmother's personalised account which has evoked the atmosphere of "that far off day, that wind, that sunny air."

He adds, "I was caught in this tangle of incoherent reflections half thoughts, half images." This dilemma is the heart of the book. Charlotte, who had returned to Russia as a girl to find her own mother, becomes more important to her grandchildren, who in turn see her as the most important player in their world.

Andrei Makine is a Russian who moved to Paris and now writes in French. One of the many fascinating facets of this sad, beautiful, old-world novel, which has echoes of Alain Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, is its merging of contemporary French fiction with the 19th-century Russian novel. French literature tends towards extremes: it can be very clever or extremely intense. Only very rarely does it achieve the unique balance of intellectual virtuosity and genuine humanity which marks the singular work of the late Georges Perec.

Recently, however, the emergence of Jean Rouaud has seen the return of a more graceful, elegiac Proustian voice. Rouaud won the Prix Goncourt with Fields of Glory in 1991 and later followed that remarkable work with the equally beautiful sequel of sorts, Of Illustrious Men (1995). Le Testament Franca is also won the Prix Goncourt, having already sold more than 700,000 copies in France, and is now according to the book's jacket - being translated in 25 countries.

The narrator's voice here manages to be both wistful and intense, almost obsessed. The idea of the boy (or of anyone) living entirely through memories as described by another, or through books, may be romantic - but it is also slightly sinister. Makine allows his narrator to move on from his initial excitement to the realisation that while in pursuit of another world, he has lost his own country, his identity, even himself.

Only when her store of memories has been exhausted does he decide his grandmother "has nothing more to teach me". Yet by the end of the novel, he has made elaborate plans to restore her to Paris and creates a room - which is in reality a museum - for her visit. Life intervenes and the spell is broken. But the real spell turns out to be that the self the narrator had thought was his is also an invention. This is a haunting, thoughtful, almost brutally honest book in which the deliberate art never conceals the intent.