Dreams of My Russian Summers, by Andreï Makine

This book is so beautifully written, so deep with indelible images, events, and people, that it’s hard to know where to start or how to shape a review of it. I think it simply has to be read, start to finish. Although I’m reading it slowly because it’s so good I don’t want to reach the end.

So, on the subject of not knowing what to say, I offer these two excerpts on language:

“From then onward we talked but said nothing. Coming between us we could see the screen that is formed by those smooth words, those echoes of the everyday we give voice to; the verbal liquid with which we feel obliged, without knowing why, to fill the silence. With stupefaction I discovered that talking was in fact the best way of saying nothing about the essential.”

“The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I know understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to be essential. The unsayable was essential.”