book review - The Woman Who Waited

If there are a couple of things you can be guaranteed with a Andrei Makine book it is beautiful descriptions of the Russian countryside and a focus on a personal story that acts as a metaphor for what has happened to an entire country.

Both of those features are present in the Woman who Waited but there is some masterly story telling going on here. The narrator is a player in the vivid student scene in Leningrad and after graduating he heads out to the wilderness looking for a village to provide him with literary inspiration.

His initial thoughts are that he can produce a satirical novel based on the peasants but the life in the abandoned villages is far from humorous and then his attention wanders to focus on the story of Vera who apparently has been waiting for her lover to return from the second world war for thirty years.

Her reputation in the village and surrounding area is almost legendary and the narrator starts to get closer to making her acquaintance. The problem is he does so taking a superior position. What could this woman in the wilderness be able to teach or show an intellectual from a major city? What could her life story provoke other than sympathy?

Because the approach taken to Vera is subtle you never notice that the narrator is completely on the wrong track about her until she opens her mouth and reveals she is not a village idiot or someone who has stayed waiting all of her life. In the end the shock of those discoveries starts to force the narrator to ask some questions about himself but he runs away from it rather than facing that conversation.

Makine is almost like a short story writer weaving deep and thought provoking stories out of just a handful of characters and locations. Vera the woman remains nearly as much of a mystery at the end with the narrator having discovered some secrets but missed out on others because of his arrogant assumptions.

It shows the difference between attitudes in the town and country in Russia as well as the differences between those keen to move on and forget the war and those who cannot. That seems to be a recurring theme in nearly all of his books because the devastation visited on a generation seems to be conveniently filed away by many characters in his books.

Ultimately the truth about Vera emerges in fragments and just as he has done all along the narrator misjudges her intentions completely having the arrogance to assume that she will come to rely on him. Once she realises that her lover is never coming back and he has created a life without her she seems set on living her life on her own terms. The narrator is used to plug a need to express some grief but he is never seriously being seen as a replacement for her love.

His arrogance that led him to believe Vera was a limited school teacher, someone who had never ventured out of the village and someone in need of an emotional prop are all revealed to be wrong and in the end he runs away rather than staying to really unravel the mystery of this woman who has waited for something for so long.

Version read – Sceptre hardback

book review - A Life's Music

This book by Andrei Makine qualifies as a novella because of its length but it is also a tight story around a tale told by a pianist to a fellow traveller on a train.

Just as with other Makine novels the landscape of Russia plays a key part as does the history and politics of the country. Things start in the Urals with a snow-covered wind whipped station and passengers waiting for the delayed Moscow train. The narrator moves from room to room until he finds a man playing the piano who is also waiting for the train.

The pianist helps the narrator get a seat on the packed train and then starts telling him his life story. The son of parents who were victims of Stalin’s purges he ran away to an Aunt in the Ukraine just in time to be caught up in the German invasion of 1941. He steals the identity of a dead Russian solider and manages to get through the war with a fair amount of bravery – echoes of Ivan in A Hero’s Daughter – before ending up as a general’s driver.

That position continues after the war and he meets the general’s daughter who is also a pianist and there is a crush then the bitter realisation of what could have been an awful mistake leaving the pianist in a corner playing the part of the fool. He almost plays it until the end but cannot resist showing off what he can do at the piano and then he disappears out of the daughter’s life and the narrative skips over his ten year in the camps and the wilderness of the frozen north.

He returns to Moscow with the narrator being brought up to speed discovering that the general’s daughter has had a son that he helps support. They then head off to a concert where history repeats itself as the pianist who had never been able to perform on stage because of his parents arrest now watches his protégé come out and fulfil a dream on his behalf.

There is plenty of tragedy here. Not only about the random pointlessness of the arrests in the Stalin years, the brutality of the war and the class system that continued to exist even in the communist system. But there is also something about the power of music and its ability to transcend class and age barriers and live on through the years.

There is also a hidden moral which is never to forget that each passenger on each journey sitting next to you could have an amazing story to tell if you are prepared to stop and listen.

Version read - Sceptre paperback

Lunchtime read: A Woman Who Waited

The beauty of this book is that along with the narrator you are so sure that it is possible to predict the actions and decipher the motivation of Vera, the woman who waited. Already she has proved that she has not wasted all of her life waiting and there are a couple more surprises in store.

After getting close to making the relationship physical Vera backs off and then disappears to go to the festival in the large town nearby. She is gone for three days and while she is away the narrator stumbles around the snow covered landscape dreaming of her and almost being paralysed by her absence. But when she returns she moves swiftly to consummate their relationship and it is only afterwards he understands why – the man she has been waiting for never waited for her. A picture of a state official and a grandfather is pointed out by a neighbour from the local paper and Vera’s heartbreak is palpable.

But the narrator is seized by cowardice and runs away rather than facing the prospect of being trapped as a replacement love interest for the intense Vera. But as he tries to escape he meets her and after a silent but meaningful row across the lake she bids him farewell. She is able to see through him and be a braver and more worthy character to let him go.

Throughout the story the narrator makes arrogant assumptions not just about Vera, the tragedy of her life and her apparent natural decision to fall in love with him, but also about the villagers who he assumes are worse off than the intelligentsia in Leningrad. But he scurries off there frightened by the rawness of their integrity in the end.

A full review will come soon…

book review: A Hero's Daughter

After reading a couple of Makine books over the last couple of weeks there are some clear themes that emerge from Andrei Makine’s work that are all in evidence in A Hero’s Daughter.

The first theme is the Second World War that devastated a generation of Russians and at the same time left the survivors with a clear sense of their importance to the world for the sacrifice the country made and to the state they were trapped by. This story starts in the war with the hero of the Soviet Union Ivan being saved by a nurse who has the foresight to hold a mirror up to his mouth to see if he is breathing.

But before too long the story moves away from the nurse and her hero and settles down to one of disappointment and living in the past remembering past glories. The story could easily stagnate there but Makine introduces a daughter who becomes a perfect way of juxtaposing the present with the past.

She also introduces the second theme, which is one of disappointment and disgust with the way Russia’s fortunes have turned out since the war ended. The daughter is a translator but ends up working for the KGB by sleeping with foreign businessmen and helping sort through their luggage while they sleep. She dreams of escaping by saving up enough hard currency to dress and move in the sort of circles that would attract someone from Russia’s intelligentsia.

She almost pulls it off but the two worlds collide with her father, who is now a widower and a drunkard, arriving in Moscow to discover not only does his daughter appear along with everyone else to ignore the past but she is also enslaved into prostitution by the state.

The shock of that discovery kills him over time and she is left realising not only the level of indifference over her father’s sacrifice as a solider all those years ago as she struggles to get anyone to bury him, but also how trapped she is. In the end she pawns his hero’s medal to pay for the funeral but returns to the job of state prostitution to help raise the money she needs to try and get the medal and a hope of her freedom back.

It is written in a way that in places is almost cinematic with sweeping battlefields and moments when you can feel the chill as the snow and wind creep in. As a method of looking at the past and at the present the idea of having a single generation works well and the relationship between father and daughter reflects that of the young and the old veterans throughout the book.

All the might be brighter and modern is not necessarily better if those behind the system are still rotten.

Lunchtime read: The Woman Who Waited

Just over half way through and the morale of the story so far seems to be about the dangers of judging someone not only by appearances but also by reputation.

Vera who becomes something of an obsession for the narrator is seen as someone who has wasted her life waiting in a little village for her childhood sweetheart to come home from the war. The narrator starts weaving scenarios around her that he believes happened and apart from clearly a growing love/lust for the woman there is strong sympathy mixed in with frustration she has spent thirty years waiting.

But when he finally sits down to talk to her it emerges that she studied linguistics in Leningrad for six years and has lived much more of a life than he ever imagined. Ironically you feel that her revelation makes it harder for him to maintain his sympathetic love and he will be forced to change his opinion and attitude towards her.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Woman who Waited

It might seem a bit repetitive but the lunchtime read continues to be Makine because they had a lot of his books in the library and they are the sort of stories that are accessible on a dipping in basis over a few days.

This story seems to be autobiographical in feel with a writer just starting to enjoy the thaw of a post Stalinist Russia heading out to the country to find some peasants that might provoke some inspiration.

In the first 50 pages its established that life in the villages is so miserable it is hardly the stuff of satirical comment and that there is not really much there to write about. But there is one woman, Vera, who has spent thirty years waiting for her lover to come back from the fighting in the Second World War.

Vera manages to get under the skin of the narrator and he starts to become obsessed with her and unable to move on from the village.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A LIfe's Music

The second half of the book is more gripping than the first because the climax of the story is coming as the pianist on the train talks about his life and what became of his thwarted ambition to play the piano.

He tells of how the war saved him because he was able to steal the identity of a dead solider who had been killed in one of the first battles with the Germans. Having stolen the identity he goes on to fight through the war until chance puts him in the right place to become a general’s driver. He keeps driving for the general after the war and is finally introduced to his daughter. They flirt on the edge of an affair before she realises it is a crush and there is too much of a difference between their worlds.

But before the ties are cut she involves him in her engagement party where he is meant to perform a couple of piano songs that she is to be credited with teaching him. He stumbles through the first but then plays the second with a level of professionalism that shocks and brings the curtain down on that relationship.

The train arrives at Moscow and the pianist tells his fellow traveller that the general’s daughter married but then died of cancer and he has been quietly supporting her son with money he made while working in the far north in the camps.

By now the pianist knows that his parents were killed in the camps and that he is marked for life by his duplicity of keeping his connection with them hidden as well as taking the identity of a dead solider.

He invites his fellow traveller to a concert and you assume that the son of the general’s daughter steps out onto the stage just as the pianist disappears.

A book that is great because just as there is a life story here there are also questions for you to take away and mull over.

A review will follow soonish…

Lunchtime read: A Life's Music

Russia is one of those countries that provides a wealth of material for writers. On one level there is the landscape, which in this case is only extensive but cold and covered in snow; there is the political environment that means you can never drop your guard and tragedy could be just round the corner; and there is also the history with the war and the extent of the sacrifice and destruction of the Second World War over shadowing the present as long as those with memories share them.

All of those ingredients are woven into the first half of this novella with Makine using a train journey from the Urals to Moscow as the opportunity to tell one man’s life story. The man in question is introduced playing the piano and weeping and as he starts to tell a tale about a piano concert that was never given because his parents were arrested and a society that shunned him as a result it is already lining up to be a tragic tale.

Add to that the decision the pianist makes to head to a relative in the Ukraine just before the Germans invade and it seems that everything that could go wrong is going wrong.

Quite how it works out has just guessing enough to want to read on to the end of the journey.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Life's Music

It is easy to get stuck in a grove but if you are enjoying it then a little bit more of what you like should do no harm. For that reason it was without a great deal of hesitation that the lunchtime read choice went straight from one Andrei Makine to another.

I only managed to start the very first few pages of this novella but already the scene is set with a bitterly cold train station in Russia the location. A bunch of travellers are left huddled in the waiting room while they wait for a train, which is going to be delayed by six hours. That gives the narrator, who you have no idea of anything about them even the sex, time to wander round the waiting room and out onto the platform almost like a camera panning the opening scene setting sequence for a film.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Hero's Daughter

The book comes to an end and the misery of the Gorbachev years is similar to the decades that have gone before. The only difference is that people now have the ability to complain. The result is they feel even worse because the illusion that their lives were going in some sort of directed formation handled by the state becomes unsustainable.

Ivan turns up for his court appearance and starts spurting out all of his feelings about the past, present and the fact they have turned his daughter into a prostitute. He never lives to see her reaction to his shared knowledge because he dies from a heart attack.

The hero’s daughter is left stranded with her father in a coffin and nothing but misery so she buries him after selling his hero’s star medal, has an abortion and heads back to sleeping with foreigners for the KGB hoping to get the money she needs to change her life.

It feels as if everybody loses in this story but the biggest loser is a country that staggers from one deceitful and decrepit leader to another with each of them undermining what little faith the people have in their own existence.

A review will follow at the weekend…

Lunchtime read: A Hero's Daughter

The same tragic situation that keeps Ivan trapped in the past and reliant on the bottle strikes in Moscow and his daughter’s life quickly unravels.

After discovering that his daughter is effectively a state sponsored prostitute her father chooses to take his anger out on a tourist café and is dragged off by the police but suffers a heart attack on the way to the station. Meanwhile any dreams his daughter had of marrying a rich diplomat crumble and she along with her flat mate who loses her boyfriend in Afghanistan both slip into the same miserable existence their parents knew before them.

Dreams of escaping are sadly beyond their reach. But suddenly the hero’s daughter discovers she is pregnant and she starts to pin her hopes on having a son of her own and leaving the capital and returning home to the country. Sadly that is the only dream she can cling to as everything else goes wrong for her.

Meanwhile Ivan is waiting to come out of hospital and be charged and hands over his hero’s medal for his daughter to look after.

All around the misery continues and there is an ironical scene where a German who had been in the army and looked through the Kremlin towers as the Nazi’s advanced on the city manages to see the same view again but this time from his hotel bedroom window.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Hero's Daughter

After wondering if there was not a case of lack of depth around the characters in this novel it suddenly becomes clear that there is a unifying force – Russia itself.

It starts to work through the novel in a more direct way as Ivan enters a Moscow world that is changing rapidly under Gorbachev. He has been sliding into alcoholism after being widowed and has pawned nearly all his war medals. It gets so bad he is picked up by the drying out station in Moscow and proceedings start against him trying to strip him of his position as a hero of the Soviet Union.

Just as he considers ending it all a letter comes from his daughter inviting him to Moscow and he is dazzled by her wealth and the prospect that she might marry a rich man. But an old war veteran pulls the wool from over his eyes and reveals that his daughter is not much more than a whore sleeping with foreign businessmen to get their secrets.

You feel that not just Ivan and his daughter’s worlds are on a knife-edge but Russia as a whole doesn’t know where it is going. The might and terror of Stalin are missed and the watering down of everything people believed in that started with Khrushchev continues to provoke merriment but also fear among the people.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Hero's Daughter

There is always something tragic lurking not too far from the surface in a Russian novel and it comes out in the second chapter of this story with a useless death as people fight over imaginary sausages in a food queue.

The irony is that Tatyana dies as Ivan is waiting for her to come home and see him on the television talking about his role in the battle of Stalingrad and it is partly because she uses her veteran pass that the others in the shop show her no sympathy.

The occasion of the funeral brings home the hero’s daughter who is almost through with her translation course in French and English and after being caught sleeping with a French athlete during the 1980 Moscow Olympics is being used by the KGB. She doesn’t seem to mind as it looks like she is going to be offered a comfortable job working on behalf of the secret police.

She seems disconnected from her widowed father who she sees as an old man who is now left alone with memories continuing a life his daughter views largely as a average sad existence.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Hero's Daughter

You can just tell that this is going to be one those books that is relatively easy to read. Compared to the Mailer, which as the post this evening will show slides into dark areas, is it a pleasurable alternative to read the Makine.

The hero Ivan is informed that the nurse who saved his life and he had promised to marry has been seriously wounded and is in hospital. He goes to visit Tatyana and she has been hit by shrapnel and lost three fingers. She has been told that she can never exert herself and have children. Ivan considers leaving her but his heart rules his head and he takes her back to his village, marries her and then goes through starvation with her and buries a son that dies before they pack up and head for the Moscow suburbs.

There the hero status manages to hold an attraction even after Stalin has died and the interest has moved onto what is happening in space and Cuba. The old veteran starts to forget the details of the war. Meanwhile he has a daughter and his wife continues to defy medical advice and puts pressure on her old war wound.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Hero's Daughter

After a while of doing the same thing you get used to it, even if it feels a little bit like a chore sometimes. So it was without a great deal of thought that a slim volume was popped in the work bag for the lunchtime read. The only problem was that meetings interfered a little bit so only the very start was consumed.

The start links together the hero of the Soviet Union and the nurse who saves his life by holding a mirror under his mouth. He manages to seek her out with his eyes and then his body as he recovers. The war is at that stage when the Russians are pushing back the Germans and making inroads into villages that have been destroyed by their enemy.

Having recovered the hero is sent back to his unit and the pair part but not before he promises to return and marry her and take her to his village after the war – something she does not seem to resist.

More tomorrow…