Confessions of a Lapsed Standard Bearer, Makine"s second novel, is a lyrical account of growing up in a small town outside Leningrad in the 1960s. Remarkably free of any overtly anti-Soviet polemic, Confessions sketches in loving detail the life-histories of two boys, Alyosha and Arkady, and their parents, spanning the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War to the invasion of Afghanistan in which Alyosha serves as a soldier. Written in the first-person by Alyosha in Paris as an extended letter to his friend Arkady either in Portland or Cleveland, the novel reads like an elegy for a lost world. Eschewing both nostalgia and sentimentality, the novel evokes a space of childhood resonant beyond the confines of history while utterly saturated with the triumphs and struggles of what it asserts as ordinary life in the Soviet Union. The action culminates in an episode in which the two boys engage in spontaneous disobedience during the opening ceremony of their local new pioneers camp by continuing to play their musical instruments after the national flag has been raised: "we hardly felt we were present on that overheated parade-ground. The orgy of sound was too intense. Dazzled by the glittering, brassy cascade, deafened by the thunder that made every cell in our bodies vibrate, we were far away. Somewhere beyond the bounds of the forests and meadows that swayed in the hot air. Somewhere beyond the horizon." The responses to their actions are refreshingly banal, the motivation and consequences of them is what the book seeks to trace. Geoffrey Strachan"s translation rings true and in limpid and haunting prose, Makine evokes a tragic, hilarious and poignant place and time.--Neville Hoad