Human Love

by Andreï Makine

Book Overview

Both a psychological thriller and a touching love story, this rich novel from the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers is set mostly in an Africa bitterly struggling to shed its colonial chains. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559708573
• ISBN13: 9781559708579
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

"If the revolution doesn't change the way we love, what's the point of all this fighting?"

Andrei Makine is somewhat of a latter day Joseph Conrad. First, he writes his novels in an adopted language -- French, in the case of Makine, who was born in Russia and moved to Paris when (I believe) he was 30. Second, his latest novel HUMAN LOVE will undoubtedly elicit from many reviewers references and allusions to the Africa of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." And, like Conrad, Makine is a first rate writer and an astute observer of human character. But I am not ready to call Makine a great writer, at least based on HUMAN LOVE. HUMAN LOVE is a jaded retrospective look at both the Russian/Marxist revolutionary program and post-colonial nationalistic politics in Africa. The message of the novel is, somewhat simplistically, that all that has real value is human love, although the novel contains no more than one or two fleeting examples of redeeming human love in practice. The anonymous narrator of the novel is a Soviet Russian, probably a diplomat or spy turned author. The novel begins when the narrator first encounters an African, Elias Almeida, when the two are imprisoned together by crazed rebels in a prison hut on the frontier between Angola and Zaire some time in the 1970s. The narrator then proceeds to tell the life story of Elias, from age 11 in 1961 in colonial Angola, his mother reduced to surviving by whoring with Portuguese soldiers; to joining his father and Che Guevera fighting as revolutionaries in the eastern Congo (Che moves on, Elias's father is killed, quite possibly by one of the Portuguese soldiers whom his mother had serviced); to Cuba; to Moscow, where he is trained as an intelligence agent; and then back to Africa where he participates as a Soviet agent in numerous subversive actions throughout the continent. In the end, Elias despairs of changing the world or the violent and greedy nature of most humans. He instead finds meaning in a few simple moments of everyday life and in a few isolated instances of love, principally a brief time he shared with a Russian young woman, Anna, who took him for a trip to where she had been born among the survivors of a Stalinist gulag in remote Siberia. Both he and Anna, however, forsake their love in the interest of their own "careers"; coincidentally, those careers cross again in the early 1990s in Mogadishu, Somalia. As the narrator tells his story of Elias, from time to time he returns to the present, which for him is the mid- to late-1990s at a conference somewhere in Africa devoted to the current state of cultural affairs in Africa and attended by "fat cat Africans of the international conference circuit" with uninhibited libidos and thousand-dollar suits, cheered on by parasitic, second-tier intelligentsia from the West. The narrator's disgust for the shallowness and hypocrisy of the conference participants mirrors the disillusionment of Elias Almeida. HUMAN LOVE is marked by many memorable episodes and scenes (the majority of which involve almost unspeakable violence and

Love in a callous world

Among the characteristics Andrei Makine's novels are renowned for are his exquisite depiction of people. His characters persevere in challenging circumstances, and his beautifully poetic language evokes the wide range of human emotions. Two examples of his great literary talents are, in my mind, Music of a Life: A Novel and The Woman Who Waited: A Novel. However, Makine's captivating new novel, while at one level a heart-rending love story, departs from his more familiar scenarios and locales. The story's primary dramatic setting is in a Southern African conflict zone spanning a period of forty years. Human relationships, profound feelings and basic survival skills are tested to breaking point against adverse realities. In contrast, Siberia, Makine's childhood home, gains prominence as a metaphor for harmony, tolerance and happiness. The novel's hero is Elias Almeida, a self-declared "professional revolutionary", who dreams of an Africa where independence and political change will also transform people into "better human beings". Son of an Angolan freedom fighter against Portuguese colonial rule, Elias helplessly watched his parents die, one after being tortured, the other casually gunned down by a grinning soldier. His escape and survival bring him in contact with a range of teachers and mentors, nurturing in him an amalgam of Christian ethics and Marxist ideology. His training takes him from Angola to Cuba, the Soviet Union and back to his home country, where, he believes, he will fight for the realization of his vision of the future. Despite his intentions to do the right thing, Elias is constantly undermined by the adverse circumstances he is caught up in. Makine depicts the ruthless historical context - from colonial rule to the East and West scrambling for influence zones in Africa's newly independent states. Connecting the actual historical events with the Elias's personal experiences Makine illustrates the contradictions between internalized propaganda and political idealism on the one hand and cold-blooded Cold War reality and ensuing destructive civil wars on the other. What sustains Elias above anything else throughout his struggle is his profound "amour humain", a concept wider-reaching than the English "human love" of the novel's title. It encompasses both the love between individuals and the love for "humanity". His love for Anna, a young Russian woman who saves him from a vicious racist attack in Moscow, encapsulated both aspects for him. "Without the love he felt for that woman, life would not have been more than a night without end...", muses the narrator at the beginning of the novel. Extensive parts of Elias's story are told in retrospect by a nameless narrator, himself a former idealistic Soviet spy turned into a disillusioned Russian author. While attending an international conference on "sustainable development" in Africa, he intends to use Elias as an example of "African Life Stories in Literature". Fragments of