Human Love: A Novel
by Andreď Makine
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andreď MakineEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-03
ISBN: 1559708573
Number of pages: 264
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Book Reviews of Human Love: A Novel
Book Review: "If the revolution doesn't change the way we love, what's the point of all this fighting?"
Summary: 4 Stars
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 cruelty), and there is much sparkling and brilliant writing. My problem with the novel is that it is not very subtle. Makine writes with an aloofness and omniscience that borders on arrogance. His points or messages are expressly stated, almost didactically so, rather than left for the reader to draw on his own.
I remember being quite impressed by the two other novels of Makine's that I have read, "Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer" and "Music of a Life". Perhaps my critical standards have evolved in the six or more years since I read them or perhaps, as I suspect is more likely, HUMAN LOVE is not quite their equal.
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