The Crime of Olga Arbyelina - Softcover

Makine, Andrei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340728159 ISBN 13: 9780340728154

Publisher: Sceptre, 1999

Synopsis

Olga Arbyelina, a White Russian princess living quietly with her adolescent son in a small French town, is a relative newcomer to the Russian community there. Intriguingly little is known about her when, in the summer of 1947, she is suspected of murdering a fellow emigre, only for the case to be dropped. As the story of the preceding year unfolds, a picture forms of her upbringing in Russia followed by her exile and marriage in France, and the details of a darker, hidden crime begin to emerge, encircling the narrative in an ever-tightening snare.

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Review

Olga Arbyelina is a princess who fled Russia during the revolution; now she lives in a town near Paris tending to her hemophiliac son, keeping ghosts at bay--an existence hollowed out by history. The town gossips obsess over her, making her into the prime character in their "game of a thousand voices." They "had a fleeting dream of figuring in a poignant melodrama called The Exiled Princess." When she is found lying next to a dead man on the local riverbank, her fame only increases. The Crime of Olga Arbyelina begins with this grim discovery and moves backward, trying to find the erotic transgressions and terrible secrets that separate this exile from the tired and ordinary world.

Andrei Makine resembles his heroine in that he is a kind of runaway; born in 1958, he fled the Soviet Union for France. There he wrote about his homeland in his adopted tongue. The well-received novels Once Upon the River Love and Dreams of My Russian Summers first appeared in French and have since been translated widely. Perhaps it is all these layers of language and memory that make his prose so thick and difficult; clearly there is a great clumsiness in this particular translation, which is rife with sentences like "She was breathing jerkily," and "A thought struck her with the painfulness and beauty of its truth." Ultimately, such writing sabotages The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, fogging up the book's exotic landscape. Translations can work two ways: they can transport you into a world of strange new music, or they can feel like schoolwork. This book is definitely the latter: you know it's supposed to be a learning experience, but the difficult, self-serious prose makes you want to resist, stare at the clock, play hooky. --Emily White

About the Author

Andrei Makine was born in Siberia in 1957, and taught at the University of Novgorod. In 1987 he left the Soviet Union and sought asylum in Paris, where he lived rough before finding teaching work. His first novel was published in France in 1990, once he'd pretended he'd only translated it from another Russian's original. His third was published under his own name and Olga Arbelina's Crime is his fifth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0340728159
• ISBN 13: 9780340728154
• Binding: Paperback