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a voluntary exüe in Russia, is as much the protagonist of this economical kiinstlerroman as the narrator himseU. The story focuses on his relationship with her and his appreciation of her as a remarkable woman who, even whUe bravely facing the horrors of the Revolution and the Stalinist regime, managed to retain the dignity and French elegance that set her apart from the rest of the narrator's eminently ordinary Russian famUy. Much of the novel concerns the differences between the French and Russian languages and their respective capacities to express subtle ideas and states of mind. Among other things, this is an account of the narrator 's struggle to love two countries: Russia for its inherent "ridiculousness " and France for its refinement. Convinced that language embodies ethos, the hero gravitates at first toward French, believing it to be more expressive of his sensibility. Later in the book, in a dramatic epiphany (the novel is full of such Joycean moments) he concludes that there exists an "intermediary language" capable of bridging the gap between the tongues. He terms it "the language of amazemenf and wonders whether it can be captured in writing. Indeed it can, one concludes after reading Dreams, tor Makine has done it in a novel as intense and personal as it is quietly political. Only two missteps in the final chapters qualify the author's achievement: the prolonged depression that the narrator experiences after he has finally traveled to France may have a basis in fact, but fictionally it's gratuitous; and the final, startUng revelation about Charlotte seems forced and equally unnecessary— an attempt to impose irony on a story whose inherent grace and earnestness are a Uttle diminished by it. (ES) Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles Henry Holt and Co., 1997, 654 pp., $27.50 Barry Miles is Paul McCartney's BosweU, with a tape recorder instead of a quUl pen. From 1991 through 1996, Miles conducted thirty-five interviews with the former Beatle (now Sir Paul, knighted by the Queen two years ago), composer of symphonic poems as weU as pop-rock classics. Mues, a London journalist/ music entrepreneur, has known McCartney since 1965, so Sir Paul felt comfortable being candid. The result is a thick book of McCartney's extended quotations, broken up by MUes' contextual passages. Because MUes has a good ear and integrity, and because McCartney, now fiftyfive , is a deeper thinker than many music idols, the mixture works. The biography tells many previously unknown stories behind the Beatles' hit singles and albums, with entire chapters devoted to some of the best, such as "Hey Jude" and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. There are also fresh anecdotes about each of the Fab Four, their wives, lovers, managers and hangers-on. Most of the book is upbeat, despite the ghastly, enthralling passages about John Lennon's The Missouri Review · 187 drug abuse, the infighting over which managerial sharks would earn the most money from the Beatles' success, and the Lennon-McCartney rift that preceded the breakup of the band. Although the McCarrney-MUes version of the truth is surely incomplete and self-serving from time to time, the book is a corrective to much of the previous journalism about the Beatles. McCartney concedes that at the height of his popularity, he often Ued to journalists, who were so hungry for a story that they rarely bothered to discover the truth: "We often used to say to journalists, 'Look, I haven't got time for the interview , just make it up.' So some of ifs arrived that way . . . You know, if ifs a good story, it sticks. Or we may have felt Uke joking that day. Ifs summer and you're in a pub having a drink and there's a guy with a Uttle book and he's going 'yayayayaya/ so to alleviate the pressure we started to try to plant lies to the press. We used to award each other points for the best story printed ... It was wonderful because it turned it aU around and the press stopped being a pressure and became a fun game. They didn't mind. Anything to fui...

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