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A review by fionaw81
Žena, ktorá čakala by Andreï Makine
4.0
All the way through this book I couldn't decide if I loved it or hated it. I put it down when I had finished and I still couldn't decide. A day later I realise that I have been thinking about it a lot and the more that I ponder it the more that I see it for the artful piece of writing that it is.
In 1970's Leningrad we meet our unnamed narrator. He is 26 years old and spends his evening socialising in the 'Wigwam', a club where subversive intellectuals and artists meet in a celebration of bad poetry and indiscriminate sex. In an attempt to find himself he goes to stay in a remote village to research old customs and folklore and to find material for the satire he wishes to write. There he meets the enigmatic, Vera and he becomes intrigued by her story. Vera, we learn, had said goodbye to her fiancé at the age of 16 and learned he was missing in action shortly afterwards. Thirty years later when our narrator meets her she is still waiting for him to come home. The story follows our narrator's attempts to both unravel the mystery of this woman and to win her affections.
I didn't immediately fall in love with this book and in large part I think that was because I really disliked the character narrating the story. He is arrogant and a narcissist, passing off his attempts to seduce Vera as for her own good, necessary to break her free from what he perceives as a life unfilled. He tells himself that he is coming to the village to learn about the culture of those who remain there but he is closed minded to their customs - unable to understand them and unwilling to learn. He sees himself as this enlightened soul who is observing the remnants of History and he feels sorry for those that he perceives as stuck in a backward past and feels himself to be of a different generation, more enlightened, embodying modernity.
But the more I reflect on the character the more I realise that he is the perfect partner to Vera's quiet conviction in her life choices. Our narrator sees Vera as someone to feel sorry for, wasting her life waiting for the man she loved when in his world the sensible thing to do would be to move on and find another but she is far from the picture he has painted of her. She is resourceful, educated and in perfect step with her own wants and needs. Each time he thinks that he has her figured out she surprises him; at every turn she defies his attempts to explain and contain her. And he is drawn to her exactly because she is the embodiment of everything modern society wishes to reject and underneath his cynicism that's what he wants too. In short, Makine's character studies are perfect, both characters are achingly well drawn.
This is a book that has so many layers - a love story, a character observation, a bitingly sharp observation of a post war country seeking it's identity in just the same way as our narrator is. It's a fairly short read with not one word of Makine's beautiful writing wasted. The descriptions of the bawdy yet hollow meetings of the Wigwam group juxtaposed against the peaceful and poetic, if sometimes heartbreaking, descriptions of life in this rural Russian village create a feeling of otherworldliness in Makine's writing. Themes around the cost of war and the loss of the old are laid bare for us to chew over. This is a piece of writing that will stay with me for a while.
In 1970's Leningrad we meet our unnamed narrator. He is 26 years old and spends his evening socialising in the 'Wigwam', a club where subversive intellectuals and artists meet in a celebration of bad poetry and indiscriminate sex. In an attempt to find himself he goes to stay in a remote village to research old customs and folklore and to find material for the satire he wishes to write. There he meets the enigmatic, Vera and he becomes intrigued by her story. Vera, we learn, had said goodbye to her fiancé at the age of 16 and learned he was missing in action shortly afterwards. Thirty years later when our narrator meets her she is still waiting for him to come home. The story follows our narrator's attempts to both unravel the mystery of this woman and to win her affections.
I didn't immediately fall in love with this book and in large part I think that was because I really disliked the character narrating the story. He is arrogant and a narcissist, passing off his attempts to seduce Vera as for her own good, necessary to break her free from what he perceives as a life unfilled. He tells himself that he is coming to the village to learn about the culture of those who remain there but he is closed minded to their customs - unable to understand them and unwilling to learn. He sees himself as this enlightened soul who is observing the remnants of History and he feels sorry for those that he perceives as stuck in a backward past and feels himself to be of a different generation, more enlightened, embodying modernity.
But the more I reflect on the character the more I realise that he is the perfect partner to Vera's quiet conviction in her life choices. Our narrator sees Vera as someone to feel sorry for, wasting her life waiting for the man she loved when in his world the sensible thing to do would be to move on and find another but she is far from the picture he has painted of her. She is resourceful, educated and in perfect step with her own wants and needs. Each time he thinks that he has her figured out she surprises him; at every turn she defies his attempts to explain and contain her. And he is drawn to her exactly because she is the embodiment of everything modern society wishes to reject and underneath his cynicism that's what he wants too. In short, Makine's character studies are perfect, both characters are achingly well drawn.
This is a book that has so many layers - a love story, a character observation, a bitingly sharp observation of a post war country seeking it's identity in just the same way as our narrator is. It's a fairly short read with not one word of Makine's beautiful writing wasted. The descriptions of the bawdy yet hollow meetings of the Wigwam group juxtaposed against the peaceful and poetic, if sometimes heartbreaking, descriptions of life in this rural Russian village create a feeling of otherworldliness in Makine's writing. Themes around the cost of war and the loss of the old are laid bare for us to chew over. This is a piece of writing that will stay with me for a while.