The Woman Who Waited (Paperback)

Andrei Makine's newest offering is "The Woman Who Waited". It is the story of a man pining for a woman he can never have, a woman living a life of "grievous beauty" waiting senselessly for a man who will never return. As with much of Makine's other works it is an elegiac prose-poem on loss and yearning. Although "The Woman Who Waited" did not have quite the same impact on me as some of Makine's earlier works ("Music of a Life" and "Dreams of My Russian Summers" come to mind) it is, nevertheless, a wonderfully realized piece of writing.

Makine, for those not familiar with his work, was born in the Soviet Union in 1958. He emigrated to France as a young man. He writes in French. (The Woman Who Waited was superbly translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, Makine's translator of choice). Makine's work for me combines the grace and elegance of the best French writers and the sad dark soul of the best Russian writers.

The unnamed narrator of Woman Who Waited is a cynical 26-year old resident of Leningrad. It is 1975, the midst of the Brezhnev era, and the narrator is part of a circle of artists and writers who chafe under the leaden weight of the regime. They smoke, drink, and scoff at notions of Soviet (and petit bourgeois) morality by adhering to notions of "free love". Random, emotion free couplings are the order of the day.

The narrator takes an opportunity to leave St. Petersburg to research customs and folk lore in the sub-Artic town of Mirnoe. Located close to the White Sea, near Murmansk and Archangelsk, Mirnoe is as close to a ghost town as you are likely to find. It is populated mostly by old ladies, a few old men, and just enough children in the area to support a one-room school house. Upon arrival in Mirnoe the narrator sees Vera. She is 46, self-composed and for the narrator a vision of some ideal version of grace and beauty. The narrator quickly hears that Vera, the local school teacher, said goodbye to her husband in 1945 at the town railway station. Sixteen at the time, Vera last words to her 18-year old husband promised to wait for him to return. Within weeks, during the successful battle for Berlin the husband is reported missing and presumed dead. Despite the virtual certainty of his death Vera has spent the next 30-years waiting chastely for the husband who will never return. As one cynical character, Otar, says to the narrator, Vera may be the only woman in Russia worth loving. The novel moves on from there in the form of the narrator's growing obsession with Vera. The life of Vera is revealed slowly to the reader as the narrator seeks to learn everything he can about her life. Along the way we see that many of his assumptions (and a few of my own) about Vera stand on shaky ground. As the novel nears its end we are treated to a fine example of being careful what we wish for.

Makine's writing is sparse and to the point. He has said repeatedly that he does not write to tell the reader what to think. He writes to tell a story as sparsely and concisely as he can and leave the thinking to the reader. That is one of the great challenges of reading Makine and one of the continuing great pleasures. You have to be actively engaged in the inner life of his characters, Makine does not do that work for you.

As I read The Woman Who Waited it reminded me of Jean Jacque Rousseau's wonderful epistolary novel "Julie or the New Heloise". In that novel the two main characters exchange a series of letters in which feelings conflict with intellect and where passion confronts purity and noble sentiment. The writing is dramatically different but some of the themes of each seem to bear more than a passing resemblance.

Early in the book Makine notes of Vera, as she walked along the shoreline only to stop at the same mailbox she had stopped at every day for thirty years that "what remained was the essence of things". Ultimately, the essence is the dish served by Andrei Makine, one without frills or adornments. I think it clear after reading "The Woman Who Waited" that Makine has provided us with a character in Vera whose honour is an essence that is seen.

This is yet another book by Andre Makine that deserves a wide audience.