The Woman Who Waited: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Andreď Makine (Author), Geoffrey Strachan (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
A sensuously styled, elegiac tale set in the mid-1970s, Makine's latest opens a window onto a generation of post-WWII Russian widows through one mysterious woman's vigil. In the village of Mirnoe on the northern White Sea coast, a young male journalist researching local customs meets an intriguing woman who has waited 30 years for her fiancé, reported killed, to return from the war. Just 16 when her lover was conscripted, Vera devotes herself selflessly to the care of the town's many war widows: she rows out to tend to the widows' graves on a nearby island and lives alone, ever watchful. The narrator, writing in retrospect but 26 at the time of the story, was educated in St. Petersburg; ironic and arrogant, he believes he has Vera's selflessness figured out as a prosaic, idealized vision of womanhood. And yet, he learns, Vera has studied advanced linguistics in St. Petersburg, and returned to Mirnoe by choice. The closer he gets to her, the more he is shamed in the face of her towering presence. Makine, now almost 50 and the author of eight other novels (including Dreams of My Russian Summers), lives in Paris; he transforms a very simple premise into a richly textured story of love and loss. (Mar.)
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From The Washington Post
Short stories contrive to use a single incident to illuminate a whole life: They aim for a short, sharp shock. Novels, those famously loose and baggy monsters, frequently transcribe entire biographies, reveal cross sections of society or show us the interaction of several generations: They contain multitudes. In between lies that most beautiful of fiction's forms, the novella or nouvelle. Here, the writer aims for the compression that produces both intensity and resonance. By focusing on just two or three characters, the short novel can achieve a kind of artistic perfection, elegant in form yet wide in implication. The closest analogue may be Aeschylean tragedy -- two actors on an almost bare stage, ripped by the torments of the human heart.

Certainly this description matches Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited. In structure, polish and theme the novel may be likened to one of Turgenev's novellas -- think of The Torrents of Spring or First Love -- in which a middle-aged man suddenly recalls an episode from his youth. Unexpectedly overwhelmed by the vacuity of his life, no matter how filled with apparent success, he happens to unearth an old letter or a faded flower and with it come flooding back the memories of . . . what? He cannot quite say. Romantic illusions? Or perhaps the one chance for real happiness, now gone forever?

As with other books by Russian-born, French-speaking Makine (such as the widely admired Dreams of My Russian Summers), The Woman Who Waited reads like a memoir. An unnamed Russian, now living in western Europe, thinks back to the mid- 1970s and that era when he was a feckless young man of 26. "It must have been during those September days . . . ." Back then he and his Leningrad friends, university-educated and hip, listen to American music, hope to be successful poets and painters, freely engage in casual sex at drunken parties. They have nothing but contempt for the Party, the bureaucratic apparatchiks, the older generation with its outmoded beliefs and morals. But after this young man accepts a research assignment to record vanishing folk beliefs, he suddenly finds himself at a settlement named Mirnoe.

It's a nothing village populated mainly by old women in their eighties. Except for one, Vera. "She is a woman so intensely destined for happiness (if only purely physical happiness, mere bodily well-being), and yet she has chosen, almost casually, it seems, solitude, loyalty to an absent one, a refusal to love." So the narrator tells us in the first sentence of his reminiscence. He goes on to add that he wrote this down in his notebook "at that crucial moment when we believe we have sized up another person." That "believe" hints at the possibility of misjudgment, and on this hinges the novel's subsequent development. For our narrator is nothing if not a novelist in the making. Given any set of odd facts or circumstances, he begins to spin out plots and scenarios to fit. All too often, as he realizes much later, "we would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person."

Vera's story is this: Back in 1945 she was 16, in love with a young man who was sent off to be a soldier. She promised to wait for him. He never came back, but she's still waiting, 30 years later. To those around her she stands as a being apart -- a saint who cares for decrepit widows, an example of fidelity that inspires awe even in lechers, a woman who has never betrayed her belief in true love. While the young girls in Leningrad are climbing out of their clothes at parties, Vera trudges through life in a weathered military greatcoat, often carrying heavy buckets of water to the sick or tending the graves of the dead. None of this would probably matter much to our narrator were it not for one detail: Vera is as beautiful as she is good.

As the book progresses, Makine enlarges its scope, making clear the contrast between two generations, that of World War II, represented principally by the old village women whose men went off to fight and never returned, and that of the narrator whose restless friends "could no longer bear to wait." Increasingly, though, Makine's alter ego comes to respect those who built their lives on the conviction that their husbands and brothers didn't die in vain. Belief, after all, is sometimes what counts, not its truth or even its falsehood but simply its power to give meaning to life.

In this sense, the narrator sees Vera as essentially "a woman who has waited thirty years," and he duly respects this fidelity to her absent soldier almost as much as he desires her person. For it grows obvious that he is falling in love. He spends more and more time in her company, their scenes together reminiscent of 19th-century romantic fiction: rowing on the lake, gathering mushrooms, visiting the village school where she teaches. But Vera is the woman who has waited, who continues to wait. Nonetheless, a young man of 26 cannot shake off the accidental glimpses of her body, or the night when he spied on her at the bathhouse. Makine's narrative is suffused throughout with carnal imagery, but here it grows lyrical:

"The soft radiance of the moon made of her a statue of bluish glass, revealing even the molding of collarbones, the roundness of breasts, the curve of hips, on which drops of water glistened. . . . She breathed in greedily, baring her body to the moon, offering it to the night, to the dark expanse of the lake.

"In the face of this dazzling, naked, physical presence, all I had thought about this woman hitherto, all I had written about her life, seemed trifling. A body capable of giving itself, of taking pleasure, directly, naturally. Nothing stood in the way of this, apart from that ancient, almost mythical vow: the wait for the vanished soldier. A ghost from the past versus a woman ready to love and be loved."

Note that telltale phrase: "all I had written about her." Even though this is a real woman, the narrator persists in viewing her as a character in a story. He sees Vera through the lens of fiction, if only the fiction he himself so readily makes up. Yet a young man's imagination is all too often egotistic, tritely sentimental and reductive. Real life, we eventually learn, is a mixed genre. What if Vera turns out to be somewhat other than what he imagines or expects? "Nothing," the narrator sets down with youthful callowness, "wounds more bitterly than conventional sexuality in a woman one has idealized."

Oh, yes there is. For the final chapters of The Woman Who Waited deliver several far more serious and bitter wounds. In the end, though, Vera accepts her life and her decisions with admirable simplicity, even if the men around her seldom behave anywhere near as well. That, alas, does seem true to the usual relations between the sexes.

As a form, the novella frequently sustains a tone of poignancy -- think of such contemporary examples as Philip Roth's The Dying Animal and James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime or Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. All of them are, in some sense, about vanished happiness, happiness lost because of age or fear or misjudgment. However, Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited quite deliberately avoids breaking your heart. It just comes very, very close. Vera is perceived only through the eyes of the narrator, but she is clearly more than just the woman who waits: Only a fool would fail to understand that she's also the kind of woman worth waiting for, and far kinder and wiser than any romantic fiction.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (March 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559707747
• ISBN-13: 978-1559707749
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #258,521 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Her honour is an essence that's not seen, March 20, 2006

By	Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

William Shakespeare, Othello.

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What is love?, August 22, 2008

By	Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"A woman, so intensely destined for happiness... refusing instead to love" characterizes Vera. She's a mysterious, strikingly attractive woman who captures the mind and heart of the young nameless narrator of this delicate, reflective love story that enchants the reader. Since age sixteen, Vera has been waiting faithfully for three decades for her soldier fiancé to return, living alone in an isolated northern Siberian village close to the White Sea. Andrei Makine is a master in exploring characters who survive at the edge of civilization, whether they are exiled political dissidents, ex-convicts, or the local people who belong to this remote harsh world. Here, he shows this at its most intimate level.

The plot itself is simple: a young man and an older woman meet during an important period in their lives and their worlds collide. Representing not only two generations, they also reflect two different visions of love, loyalty, altruism - life. It is highly relevant that the story unfolds against the remote, stunning landscape of the North, beautifully evoked by the author. There is undoubtedly a certain level of romanticizing of the Siberian environment - childhood home of Andrei Makine - in his detailed depiction of the forest emerging from the mist, the lake bathed in silvery moonlight, and even the very basic bathhouse that the community shares. It is, as the narrator reflects, a place frozen outside time.

Twenty-six-year-old Leningrad intellectual, jaded by the political environment there (it is the mid nineteen seventies and oblique references to Soviet reality seep into the story), arrives in Mirnoje to undertake research into the folklore of the North. Vera's life has been filled for many years with serving the community: she is looking after a group of old, abandoned war widows and teaches in primary school. From the first moment, the narrator glimpses the tall striking silhouette, clad in a long army coat, he is intrigued. Increasingly, though, his intellectual curiosity turns into something more. As he invents reasons to stay close, talk to her, and takes to following her in her daily routines, physical infatuation takes over that he finds difficult to control. Vera, old enough to be his mother, fully aware of the young man's desires, responds calmly, gently, yet remains aloof and mysterious. Keeping a diary of his evolving image of her, he rationalized her motives for the monastic life she leads, trying to capture the essence of her being. More than once, though, he has to revise his interpretation of who Vera is and what kind of love had made her wait for a man she hardly knew. Is it possible for the narrator, and by extension the reader, to conceive of such love and relate to it?

Makine's telling of the story, in slow motion, is achingly beautiful. It has to be savoured sentence by sentence, not rushed through. Having read the original French, which is, as always, exquisite, I cannot comment on the English translation. However, having read other Makine work in translation, I have been impressed with Geoffrey Strachan's particular talent to convey and transpose the delicate nuances in the fluid and poetic language that is the hallmark of Makine's French. [Friederike Knabe]

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotions or Logic...You Decide , April 1, 2006

By	Lorraine M. Weston (TN, United States) - See all my reviews

Makine has given us quite a thought-provoking novel...touching on life choices...the emotional aspect of our choices...and the logical aspect of our choices, and the borders that are crossed with both choices. Some of us choose with our hearts, while others choose the logical (or what seems to be logical) path to live our lives.

The 26-year old narrator in this novel is given an opportunity to travel to a remote area of Russia near the White Sea, in order to write about the culture and traditions of the women in the town of Mirnoe, a town that is a dot on the geographical map, and also a dot on the map of time. He arrives with preconceived notions, and a sense that the small town, borders on the edge of limbo, and is inhabited by those with simple minds.

It is a town that has stood still, has not moved forward...one with barely enough children to fill a one-room schoolhouse...and a town whose residents are mainly women...who have lost the men in their lives, to war. These women all have one common ground...they wait for their loved ones to return. The wait outlasts their lives. The women are aging...and dying quickly...and one woman...Vera...is committed to overseeing their burials...out of respect for their determination, and out of a deep-rooted sense of obligation.

Vera, herself, is in the same situation...waiting for her sweetheart to return from war...waiting for 30-years...from the time she was 16-years old. She made a verbal committment to him that she would wait for him, and wait for him, she does. She has built her entire life upon his return..including the placement of the chair to her dining table...which faces the window that overlooks the path he would have to walk upon his return...she wants to be able to see him immediately. She has become a creature of habit, within her world, a world that the narrator sees as simple, ridiculous, illogical, and a world full of surprises that opens his eyes, and awakens him, eventually. She has chosen to emotionally survive, in the best way she can. She is not the sum of her exterior, not the sum of her desire and need to wait for a man who has not yet returned...she is much more complex, than this 26-year old narrator ever imagined.

Deep within her is a vibrant soul, and a woman of great substance, dignity, intelligence, intensity, confidence and fear.
She is literally, a woman of beauty, from the inside out. Her choices have been thought out, concise and clear, and she has knowingly made them, realizing that they might not be logical to others, and even at times to herself. She has chosen to live where she does for reasons in addition to the waiting for her sweetheart. I will not divulge the contents of the book, in order to explain those reasons.

The narrator makes many assumptions about Vera, unfounded assumptions not based on fact. The narrator, himself is waiting, in a sense, waiting for the woman he loves to acknowledge him. But, he does not see that he is basically in the same situation as Vera, due to his shallow emotional shell. His life is based upon superficial behavior, as an artistic person, his lifestyle borders on the theory of passion, lust and the bizarre. The narrator eventually begins to see Vera for the complete person she is...and he falls in love with her.

The end has a surprise or two...and the novel is completely realized. Emotions or logic, you decide which is the better path, or if life is a blend of both.