A RUSSIAN MOTHER

First English translation of the well-known poet's fiction: an openly autobiographical novel originally published in 1978, when it won France's Grand Prix du Roman. The book consists of several sequences presented out of chronological order and as direct addresses to the unnamed narrator's mother, recently dead. She was a famous violinist and mercurial egotist, the force of whose personality overpowered her son's entire later life, leaving him now to recount to her his remembered childhood and adolescence, wartime service, chaotic love life, and postwar career as a writer- -seeking some resolution of his mingled love and hatred for her. Unfortunately, all this is tediously reiterated and insufficiently dramatized; the reader is given no reason to perceive the woman thus obsessed over as anything more than an imperfect wife and mother and eventually cantankerous old woman. What provoked this self-absorbed recital may lie still buried in its author's psyche; it isn't on the page.