Portrait of the Artist as a Failure

In interviews, Russian émigré author Andreï Makine often describes his life as the ascetic existence of an intellectual from an era past: living alone in a small, empty apartment; drinking excessive amounts of coffee; writing novels on an electric typewriter in the dead of night. Shutov, the protagonist of Makine’s most recent novel, The Life of an Unknown Man — his twelfth — leads a life strikingly similar to Makine’s, with a key difference: Shutov’s writing never won him the prestigious French literary awards the Prix Goncourt or the Prix Médicis. Instead, he is a failed novelist who occupies a spare attic apartment in Paris, the city to which he immigrated, seeking escape from the Soviet Union. He lives apart from the rhythms of contemporary life and modern technology; media and new ideas do not enter his sphere of awareness.