A4-5a/ Andrei Makine
HUman LOve
lArge size paperback

in good condition

2008

Human Love

by Andrei Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan

256pp, Sceptre, £12.99

Andrei Makine has exceptional gifts for getting to the heart of true feeling. His new novel, Human Love, is audacious even by his own standards, examining the paradox that, set beside savagery, love may seem a frail thing; yet without it, life is often little more than manipulation and murder. Human Love tells the story of the affair between a black Angolan revolutionary and a Russian woman who saves him from racist thugs in Moscow. Makine's coup is to measure this secret lifelong affair against the very public rape of Africa.

The story is put into the mouth of an unnamed Russian writer attending a lavish literary jamboree in Conakry, Guinea; a nicely sardonic and sensitive recorder at odds with the new Africa. During the Angolan war, while locked up by Unita rebels who might well have killed him, he occupied a prison in the bush with a badly beaten, unconscious man whom he took to be dead and whose pen he tried to steal - until the "corpse" whispered that it had run out of ink. In one of the superbly judged ironies that mark this exceptional book, the man recording the life and times of Elias Almeida, black revolutionary and Soviet agent, is using the same pen, a gift of the
man he once tried to rob.

As a child in the civil war that split Angola after independence, Elias witnesses the Portuguese departure, sees his mother and father destroyed and Africa become a pawn in the cold war. Recruited by the Russians, schooled in Moscow, he is sent back to Africa as a Soviet agent. The conflicts of the 1970s and 80s in Angola, the Congo and the Horn of Africa are seen though Russian eyes.

Elias is a devout revolutionary; he believes the prophets of revolution. These beliefs are to be sorely tested throughout his life, not just by his Russian masters, but by fellow Africans whom Almeida blea
RRP=$38.99