It seems a bit of a stretch to claim Makine's swearing allegiance to the tricolor as a glorious event in the country's literary history. But then again, probably not since Caesar has any outsider expressed such a fierce attachment to France. ``Le testament francais'' (which was published in English as ``Dreams of My Russian Summers,'' likely to much Gallic chagrin) tells the story of a young Russian boy who visits his French-born grandmother, and who is utterly entranced by her tales of a romantic, bygone France and longs for all the beauty that this mythical place represents.

There are fine, sweepingly dramatic passages in that book, especially the wartime scenes in Soviet Russia, but the novel is also at times dense with self-dramatization and precious philosophical insight. Nevertheless, ``Le testament francais'' was a huge critical and popular success in France, selling more than a half-million copies.

Makine's love letter to French culture and language appeared at a time of high unemployment and general insecurity about France's place in the world, and that surely accounts for at least part of the novel's success there. Perhaps even more important, ``Le testament francais'' self-consciously evokes Proust; it waxes with the sort of lyrical nostalgia likely to strike a chord with French readers, especially older ones.

`Once Upon the River Love,'' which was originally published in France in 1994 and has been faithfully translated by Geoffrey Strachan, is a less successful exercise in poeticized introspection and sentimental longing. Set in the 1970s amid the otherworldly barren Siberian steppe, it follows the progress of three adolescent boys on a journey of intellectual and sexual awakening. In some ways, it aspires to be a straightforward coming-of-age novel, a kind of ``Huckleberry Finn'' on the Volga: Aloysha, the novel's young protagonist, and his pals chase girls, go skinny-dipping, and even manage to escape their village as stowaways.

``Once Upon the River Love'' is at its best when it tells this story straightforwardly, pausing only to flesh out details of the world as the boys perceive it. For example, a description of ``rusty nails, as thick as a man's thumb, driven into the trunks of huge cedar trees'' becomes a quietly personal emblem of the country's turbulent history. The massive nails, which were used to hang partisans during the Russian Revolution, ``had risen, over long years, to twice a man's height, in accordance with the slow and stately growth of the cedars. To our marveling eyes the Reds and the Whites, who had gone in for these cruel hangings, had the stature of giants.''

This vision, at once horrible and wondrous, described with plain, potent language, reminds one of Milan Kundera, another emigre who has found both a home and a new language in France. But whereas Kundera is a fiercely political writer, Makine, for all his concern with the tides of history, always brings the focus back to individual identity.

Unfortunately, though, Makine's individuals are too often nothing more than unlikely mouthpieces for his own philosophical pronouncements. Indeed, almost every breathtakingly understated description of the Siberian wilderness is twinned with a claim of equally breathtaking affectation. His young Siberians are constantly spouting such ponderous claims as: ``Suddenly, with an unbearable clarity, I understood: I am condemned both to this beauty and to the suffering it conceals''; ``to be neither one thing nor the other is also a destiny''; or ``Yes, before the train passed, I must implant into my heart and into my body that mysterious organ: love.''

As well, if there is any truth to F. Scott Fitzgerald's admonition that using an exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke, then it could fairly be said that ``Once Upon the River Love'' comes with its own tinny laugh track. Even more annoying, the text is peppered with ellipses that . . . seem to have no real point . . . other than to create a sense of drama where none exists!

Those may seem minor quibbles, but ``Once Upon the River Love'' is a novel deeply in love with its own language and rhythms; Makine seems to believe absolutely in his own character's claim that ``Everything depends on the way you do things and not what you do.'' But while we can excuse a teenager for falling for that kind of know-nothing aestheticism, Makine ought to show better sense. Even though the story is told from the remove of a man looking back on his childish ways, the novelist himself seems incapable of any ironic distance.

From time to time, this complete immersion in the past does translate into a powerful immediacy. A chapter devoted to Aloysha's first sexual experience, for instance, is a convincing mix of fear and pity. When he looks up from the bed into the electric glare of a lightbulb and mourns ``the horrible mess that was love'' we understand, and believe, this insight. For instead of trying to impress with profound abstractions, Makine concretely shows the ways in which sex can be linked to shame.

But ``Once Upon the River Love'' is rarely this specific. In his heart of hearts, one senses, Makine thinks of himself not as a storyteller but a poet. And that's a shame, really. As he showed in ``Le testament francais,'' when he sticks to telling it like it is, without all the self-consciously poetic finery, he can reproduce a world that is almost tangible.