Synopses & Reviews
A moving, utterly captivating love story:
Romeo and Juliet as if told by Chekhov or Dostoevsky.
In a remote Russian village a woman waits, as she has waited for almost three decades, for the man she loves to return. Near the end of World War II, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek left the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returned they would marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fought his way almost to Berlin, was reported killed in action crossing the Spree River. But Vera refuses to believe he is dead, and each day, all these years later, faithfully awaits his return.
Then one day the narrator arrives in the village, a twenty-six-year-old native of Leningrad, who is fascinated both by the still-beautiful woman and her exemplary story, and little by little he falls madly in love with her. But how can he compete with a ghost that will not die?
Beautifully, delicately, but always powerfully, Andreï Makine delineates in masterly prose the movements and madness that constitute the dance of pure love.
Review
"The Woman Who Waited quite deliberately avoids breaking your heart. It just comes very, very close....Only a fool would fail to understand that [Vera is] the kind of woman worth waiting for, and far kinder and wiser than any romantic fiction." Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
Review
"[A] wonderful novel....[A]n elegantly enigmatic tale that explores a number of themes that may seem a little outdated to some readers but which meld seamlessly with the novel's mise-en-scene..." Booklist
Review
"The story grows steadily more complex and moving than its somewhat banal central contrast...had promised....Another fine work from one of Europe's most lavishly gifted writers." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The bleakness of the postwar countryside, the rise of the post-1968 Russian intelligentsia, and examples of love both false and true make this a haunting and satisfying tale. Recommended." Library Journal
Review
"[A]n entertaining story about love, the onset of maturity, the moral complications of cultural dissidence and Soviet life as it was lived in a northern corner of the empire....The Woman Who Waited is the opposite of academic or dryly philosophical." Andrey Slivka, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[A] fine new novel....Makine's books are deceptively slim: He can pack more in a page than many authors can wedge into a chapter....His ninth novel is less ambitious, but he uses what could have been a clichéd romance to confound expectations....[E]ven if the men around her don't ultimately amount to much, in Vera, Makine has created a woman well worth waiting for." Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire Christian Science Monitor review)
About the Author
Andreï Makine was born in Russia in 1958 and emigrated to France in 1987. In 1995 his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers won the Goncourt Prize and the Médicis Prize, France's two most prestigious literary awards. He divides his time between Paris and a village in southwestern France.