What are the motifs in Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine?

Time is a recurring idea in the story. In order for Charlotte to tell the history of France with the sense of immediacy that she shares her stories with her grandchildren, it is necessary for her to compress decades of time and history. Charlotte is extremely adept at this skill of storytelling, and regularly draws stories from her own past, her uncle's past, her mother's past, and the stories passed on from generations before her, but each of the stories is retold in a way that enraptures the children, and the readers of the novel.