In his column, the former Federal Councillor shares a book that has made an impression on him. This month, he comments on the latest novel by'Andrei Makine.
Sometimes, a novel says more about the reality of the last century than a history book. Such is the case with Andrei Makine's Prisoner of the Scarlet Dream.
It's true that Andrei Makine's life is a novel in itself. Makine was born an orphan in a small Siberian town. Little Andrei was taken in and raised by a lady of French origin. She turned him into a bilingual child in his fourth year. Makine deepened his linguistic skills in his studies, which took him to Moscow University, where he submitted a thesis on «the childhood novel in contemporary French literature». In 1987, at the age of thirty, he fled to France. He lived there very modestly until the publication of
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