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Human Love: A Novel
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Human Love: A Novel
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Human Love: A Novel
Ebook213 pages3 hours

Human Love: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

“A haunting, often very tender story written in a kind of meditative fury . . . Makine has written one of the best novels about Africa in a long time” (The Guardian).
 
Love for another person. Love for humanity as a whole. Are the two compatible or mutually exclusive? In his most ambitious novel since Dreams of My Russian Summers, Andreï Makine takes us into the heart of Africa. His hero is Elias Almeida, a black revolutionary whose father was killed when Elias was still a child, and whose mother, to feed him, was forced to prostitute herself. Saved from death by a Catholic priest, Elias becomes a brilliant pupil destined for greatness. However, the memory of his parents turns him into an important cog in the worldwide revolutionary movement, sending him to Cuba and the Soviet Union to be trained for espionage and sabotage. He begins in his native Angola, still struggling to liberate itself from the colonial yoke, and moves to other political hot spots. But what happens when a black revolutionary dedicated to bettering the world falls in love with a white woman who wants only to live a peaceful, simple life?
 
“[A] powerful meditation on the price of ideology and the nature of love.” —The Daily Mail
 
“Makine’s prose . . . injects a sense of beauty into even the most horrific descriptions of depravity . . . This, his tenth novel, is a movement toward hope.” —Foreword Reviews
 
“Andreï Makine has witnessed history transform his country. His sombre, perceptive fiction reflects each ebb and flow; his quiet voice is unique. Even here, in one of his minor works, he again articulates the profundity of human experience—no small feat.” —The Irish Times
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 31, 2011
ISBN9781628722147
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Human Love: A Novel
Author

Andreï Makine

Andreï Makine is an internationally best-selling author. He is the winner of the Goncourt Prize and the Medicis Prize, the two highest literary awards in France, for his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 and raised in the Soviet Union. Granted asylum in France in 1987, Makine was personally given French citizenship by President Jacques Chirac. He now lives in Paris. Arcade Publishing has published ten of Makine’s acclaimed novels in English.

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Reviews for Human Love

Rating: 3.62069275862069 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In lesser hands this tale of the triumph of love and the human spirit against a bleak backdrop of wars and other horrors could easily have been trite and cliched, but Makine's writing transcends this, and I found this a very moving and impressive novel. The book tells the story of Elias Almeida, an Angolan "professional revolutionary" across various African war zones over forty years, and also spells in Cuba and Soviet Russia. As one would expect from a writer brought up in the dying days of Soviet Russia, it is very strong on the moments of minor heroism that transcend the gradual decline of big ideology-driven movements and conflicts. Elias's story is told by a younger friend, a Russian agent working in Angola and other African war zones, and later a writer able to reflect on what has changed in Africa since the "end of history".In some ways this reminded me most strongly of Doctor Zhivago. Elias is motivated by an impossible and platonic love for Anna, a Siberian who rescues him from racist thugs in Moscow, and their trip to visit her mother in Siberia is pivotal - the Siberia whose landscape itself is built on the wreckage of idealistic dreams. The African backdrop moves gradually from idealistic liberation struggles via cold war power games through to anarchic wars motivated purely by greed and self interest. Petty brutality and injustice are never very far from the surface.To pack so much history and feeling into such a short story is ambitious, but for me it works and the ending is very moving, and entirely consistent with Makine's wider oeuvre, much of which is more memoir than fiction.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A sad book, a poignant story of imported mini-revolutions all over the globe, as witnessed by an Angolan participant and a Soviet "expert-turned-writer" who narrates the story. Most of Andrei Makine's books (this one is my 5th) are permeated with a melancholy streak, which by no means it makes them less appealing. His unique style, his intriguing attention to detail, uncovering so much meaning in each detail and being able to deliver this meaning to the reader are the mark of a master writer. The book won't go away after the last page is read. It persists in your mind, you don't want it to (it's too grim), but it does, provoking the question: why?...
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Found it difficult, possibly because of the translation. Didn't seem to flow.