Brief Loves that Live Forever

Andrei Makine's new book is a slim, solemn, dreamlike glimpse into the Russian past. in a series of short, oblique episodes, essentially short stories, an unnamed narrator recalls his life as an orphan in the Soviet era, the brutality and stupidity of life under Communism, and the people that he encountered as he moved through the years of Brezhnev, Afghanistan and Perestroika. This isn't, though, a book that's really concerned with history or politics - every story here is a love story of some kind, about love experienced or lost or witnessed. In Makine's world, love is the only meaningful form of resistance, and it resists endlessly: on a grey May Day, where a dying man broken by the Gulag watches the parades and waits for a woman from his past to walk by; under the shelter of an enormous billboard of Brezhnev, during a summer thunderstorm; in the largest apple orchard on earth, built as a sterile and senselessly beautiful symbol of Soviet might, where a disfigured Afghanistan veteran confronts a beautiful, doomed young dissident.

Makine, who escaped the Soviet Union in the late eighties, has always written in French, but had to begin his career in Paris under the pretence that his French writings were in themselves translations from Russian. Geoffrey Strachan is his long-time English translator, and his translation of Brief Loves that Live Forever is as crisply lyrical and as beautifully sparse as this outstanding writer deserves.