La Promenade des Russes

by Véronique Olmi

Je marchais dans les rues de Nice, ma Babouchka s'était accrochée à mon bras. Elle venait de poster sa vingtième lettre au directeur d'Historia. Il faisait chaud, je me demandais si Suzanne viendrait à la plage, si ma mère réapparaîtrait un jour, si Anastasia Romanov était toujours vivante et rôdait dans les parages...J'avais treize ans. Peu de certitudes. Et beaucoup d'imagination... V.O.

216 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 3, 2008

About the author

Véronique Olmi is a French playwright and novelist. She won the Prix Alain-Fournier emerging artist award for her 2001 novella Bord de Mer. It has since been translated into several European languages. Olmi has published a dozen plays and half a dozen novels.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sonja lives in a unmovable, timeless Nice with her grandmother, who spends her time writing to heads of state and editors of newspapers because she knows what really happened to Anasthasia and the Zar family in 1918 and will tell no one but them. Sonjas mother leaves over and over, trying to be less russian and happier, failing to express her love for her daughter. Her father lives by himself, terrified that he will have to take Sonja in and more than ready to keep her away. And Sonja... Sonja is trying to navigate this life of hers.

This is a powerful novel about identity, trauma and family; about remembrance, memory and reality. The tone manages to capture the voice of a lost but determined 13 year old who isn't french - but isn't russian either. It shows the love we can have even for deeply flawed and closed up family and, for the most part, manages to step around kitsch and romantizised nostalgia. I read the german translation, which is fairly good - but it reads like a novel that would do even better in french.

[Corinne Levet · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was great - the narrator looks back at her life at the age of fourteen years old, living with her grandmother, as her parents have separated and are apparently incapable of doing right by her. There's a bit of Romain Gary here in the dialogues and the young person's point of view, as well as the chracterisation of the old lady. But there is also a deep sensitivity to the girl's predicament, and a very convincing evocation of loneliness. Olmi has top credentials in psychological portrayal, well reflected here. The descriptions of nice as a claustrophobic place caught between the mountains and the sea were also striking.

[Marion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Une bouffée d'oxygène, un pan de vie... envoûtant !