Andreï Makine has come a long way since his spell sleeping rough in graveyards. After defecting from the Soviet Union in 1987, he famously squatted in a tomb in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery, scribbling away by night among the dead giants of French literature. Today Makine is hailed as a modern-day Proust - so you might imagine those evenings of sepulchral vagrancy to be a painful but distant memory.
Yet the author seems to have forgotten nothing. He is possessed of an astonishing ability to recollect events, feelings and scenes long gone; and the further he travels away from the land of his youth, the keener his retrospective recall becomes. One after another, the mesmerising and enigmatic novels of this naturalised Frenchman have re-examined the history of the USSR. "My books are like individual planets," Makine has said, "some more remote and further out than others, but all orbiting the same star."
The Woman Who Waited is no exception. It tells of a young Leningrad intellectual in the mid-1970s who spends time in a hamlet in northern Russia, recording and annotating the ancient folk songs and bridal rituals of a group of elderly widows. Beguiled by dreams of fleeing to the west, he initially views his task as nothing more than a laborious way to earn a crust, to be endured only in the cynical hope of filling his journal with scathing observations of provincial life. However, the experience has an unex-pectedly profound effect, largely because of a brief love affair with an isolated village woman, who has been waiting for her fiancé to return from war for more than 30 years.
The novel unfolds in the intensely sensitive, poetic style we have come to expect of Makine - an often painstakingly delicate presentation of intricate obser-vations, captured with the measured scrutiny of a literary Tarkovsky. But in its vivid descriptions of decadent orgies in Leningrad art studios and rather less glamorous gang-bangs in provincial clubhouses, the novel is also laced with a humour and sexiness that are less familiar. Though Makine's grip on the narrative steering wheel seems to loosen with each new work, he never loses his sense of verbal economy and discipline. The ramble is not always a comfortable one, either, with flashes of sudden violence and brutality.
It is tempting to conclude that, in this tale of a man looking back on a younger self desperate to leave the Soviet Union, Makine's trenchant, questioning gaze has finally come to rest upon himself. But part of his genius is his uncanny ability to make each of his (very different) protagonists wholly convincing. Makine has been compared to Chekhov, perhaps because of this ability to inhabit fully the minds of his characters, skilfully capturing all their contradictions and complexities.
Ultimately, though, it is the beauty of the images in The Woman Who Waited that proves its most memorable feature: ice cracking on a lake like breaking harpsichord strings; a shining swirl of snowflakes that opens the narrator's heart after a night of bitter disappointment; a man in a boat holding a corpse in his arms with the strength and tenderness of a lover. Right through to the devastating and virtuosically rendered final scene, these extraordinary pictures infiltrate the subconscious, echoing there long after the story has ended, becoming increasingly like one's own half-forgotten memories.
