My first experience of this author is a recent – and there I was thinking him long dead – short novel beginning in a childhood in one of the Siberian cities. Chronologically it begins when the narrator sees a new kid in the school being picked on for looking effeminate – he gets the lad out of a scrape, and they rush to the tiny enclave dubbed either "Devil's Corner" or "the Kingdom of Armenia", basically a slum of cheap housing overlooking the prison, and therefore perfectly handy for a dozen families from Armenia to wait and watch the walls of the jail until they release their political prisoner fathers and husbands. The first time there shows the lad the wonders of the Armenian female, in both the coffee-serving mother and the younger kind, and when he then returns with Vardan, the poorly Armenian friend of the title, a connection is made that will last.

The superlative thing here is that you can read this as a story of a friendship, but you can also read it as a snapshot into the Armenian lot. "[Something] had already alerted me to the fact that behind the great joy I had experienced in 'the Kingdom of Armenia' [meaning the slum] there might also lie hidden a great sadness [and that applies to both territories of the same name]". The girl in question was brought up seeing the stalwart defence of Mount Ararat, and yet everyone is thousands of miles from home because fifty years ago the February uprising was trying to stop yet another attack from the Turks. Just years before the Turkic genocide against the Armenians had stolen the beautiful peaks of Ararat and declared them their own. (That would be the Turkic genocide of Armenia that Hitler was on written record of thanking for inspiration – the genocide where people were shod with metal shoes exactly like ponies and forced into their own long march, and so much more I dare not taint a humble book review with.)

OK, I kind of bent the truth a little there – you have to read it as a snapshot of Armenia and her spirit, if you know anything about it. That is first here, before any friendship. You could easily see the narrator, after all of this, gaining just as much from the Armenian-ness of Vardan as from Vardan himself. So this is some kind of love letter to simpler, humbler times, where nationalities don't count a jot and humanity is the key. Yeah, a fantasy, then – but a lovely one. And one that allows the story to be both light and fresh and elegiac, building much from incidental-seeming detail. It put me in mind of someone else, too – Kadare, and the way he writes 'around' the subject of Albania while presenting a more universal-seeming story. And while I might have engaged with this more, having been to Armenia, and learnt about what I wrote of earlier, this too seemed a universal pleasure. Four and a half stars.

When I read Makine’s Music of a Life I was blown away by his masterful, lyrical prose. My Armenian Friend didn’t have the same effect sadly, This coming of age story is beautifully written, of course, but it didn’t draw me in as before. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t relate to the characters in any way or perhaps my expectations were just too high. I really don’t know. I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to read it but it just wasn’t for me.

With thanks to Welbeck Publishing and NetGalley for a review copy.

'“He taught me how to be someone I was not.”

When I was young that was the way I used to refer to how meeting Vardan opened my eyes to the mystery and paradox that underlie the workings of this world.

Nowadays what I see is no longer a host of obscure enigmas and astounding paradoxes but this simple truth which, thanks to him, I finally came to understand: when we resign ourselves to giving up the search for the other being that we are, it kills us long before we die–in that frenzied and voluble play of shadows which is regarded as the only life possible. Our life.'

My Armenian Friend (Kindle Edition), translated by Geoffrey Strachan from Andreï Makine's L'Ami arménien, is the 15th novel in English by the pair, all of which I have read and savoured for their sumptuous prose. If there has been a negative of my experience it is that the prose can be a little too rich - a sentence in this novel reads I had a pusillanimous but prudent intuition that I should not make a second attempt to experience the dazzlement of that half hour, but rather preserve it intact in an aura of enchantment, like the luminous vision of Mount Ararat, like the fleeting–and almost unreal–appearance of Gulizar. - and that many of the books blend into one another, with a mix of east-meets-west (particularly France and Russia, echoing Makine’s own journey), and dream-like remembered loves. And none has ever quite reached the heights of the book that made his name, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis winning Le Testament français (whose title in the US was rendered as Memories of Our Russian Summers), his fourth novel in French although first to be translated in the UK.

My Armenian friend shares the prose style of much of Makine/Strachan's work and it's looking-back-fondly (if tragically)-on-a-past-relationship theme, although here the narrator is looking back on his friendship, aged 13 and in the early 1970s, with a fellow schoolboy. Both live in remote Siberia, the narrator, who lives in an orphanage, makes friends with Vardan largely as both are not part of the usual gang.

Vardan comes from a small community of Armenians who are here to do their best to support members of their family who are on detention in a Siberian prison awaiting trial:

'A few years previously, down there in remote and mysterious Armenia, they had been commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of a monstruous massacre, a national tragedy, and on this occasion some bold young spirits had taken it into their heads to form a clandestine organisation and embark on a struggle to regain the independence of their historic native land. The authorities had not been slow to react, very serious accusations came thundering out: nationalist propaganda, separatist subversion, an anti-Soviet conspiracy …'

Vardan is in ill-health, suffering with "the Armenian disease" which I think is familial Mediterranean fever, meaning he is often off-school, so the narrator, himself without a family, increasingly spends time with Vardan's, and comes to learn about the tragic history of their community, but one which gains its power by being rendered in personal stories rather than statistics: 'Once you start counting in millions all capacity to be moved loses its edge, the most sincere desire to feel sympathy grows weak. And the study of the particular historical situation leads, whether we wish it or no, to analysis, to the examination of the facts, an exposition of the reasons, which veers dangerously close to justification.'

Interestingly Makine's previous novel in French - 2019’s Au-delà des frontières has been skipped in translation, perhaps as in France it "polarised critics with its reactionary discourse" (per an article in Slovo) - and there is an odd scene at the end of the novel when the narrator seems horrified that his orphanage (of which he hardly had fond memories) has been demolished and turned into an upmarket shopping centre:

'And this new world, increasingly invasive and “blended”, from Siberia to New York, would have found no scrap of land to give shelter to that little cohort of exiles, with their memories, their hopes and those two family photographs in the room where Vardan slept on a bed made up of suitcases. From the top of the rampart the advertising slogans enjoined the multitudes to endlessly consume, to satisfy a myriad of instant desires, to be forever “relocating”, to blend all cultures together in one brew, to celebrate all things exotic.

Walking around the sites of those vanished times, I fell to wondering what there was that was exotic about Vardan’s life and mine in those years when the communist empire was coming to an end. A large Siberian town, a poverty-stricken district, outside which people seldom strayed and, behind that rampart–those windows criss–crossed with thick iron bars, the antechamber to the camps. To the human beings of today, proud to be “citizens of the world” and swearing only by “world culture”, such an existence could not fail to seem appallingly limited.

Yet this modernity, which claimed to be united by a connection to everything and everyone, was in reality closing in on itself with increasing deafness.'

A rather sentimental end (given the horror that lies beneath the story) to an otherwise lyrical novel.

3.5 stars - thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

Bibliography (all translations by Geoffrey Strachan

Those 15 novels with the title and publication date of their English translation (out of 18 Makine has published under his own name):
Le Testament Français (1997) - from Le Testament français, 1995
Once upon the River Love (1999) - from Au temps du fleuve Amour, 1994
The Crime of Olga Arbyelina (1999) - from Le Crime d'Olga Arbelina, 1998
Confessions of a Lapsed Standard-Bearer (2000) - from Confession d'un porte-drapeau déchu, 1992
Requiem for the East (2001) - from Requiem pour l'Est, 2000
A Life’s Music (2002) - from La Musique d'une vie, 2001
A Hero’s Daughter (2004) - from La Fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique (1990)
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme (2005) - from La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme, 2003
The Woman Who Waited (2006) - from La Femme qui attendait, 2004,
Human Love (2008) - from L'Amour humain, 2006
The Life of an Unknown Man (2010) - from La Vie d'un homme inconnu, 2009
Brief Loves that Live Forever (2013) - from Le Livre des brèves amours éternelles, 2011
A Woman Loved (2015) - from Une Femme Aimée, 2013
The Archipelago of Another Life (2019) - from L'archipel d'une autre vie, 2016
My Armenian Friend (2023) - from

Not (yet) translated
Le Monde selon Gabriel, 2007
Cette France qu'on oublie d'aimer, 2010
Le Pays du lieutenant Schreiber, 2014
Au-delà des frontières, 2019

"In the Siberia of the 1970s our storyteller, who grew up as an orphan steps, in to help an boy who is being targeted by bullies. This act of compassion blossoms into a friendship. The narrator becomes a part of the family gradually forming connections with its members who have found themselves far away, from their homeland. This narrative unfolds as a compelling coming-of-age story, providing exploration of the memories tied to the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire."