Nearly three decades after a young Russian soldier is reported killed in action during World War II, his fiancée clings to a vain belief that he has survived and steadfastly awaits his return, a situation that frustrates a Leningrad native who has fallen madly in love with the woman. By the author of Requiem for a Lost Empire. This wonderful novel is set in what is known as the Soviet period of stagnation--the 1970s, or late Brezhnev era. The university-educated narrator wistfully looks back on a few months in mid-decade when he left his cynical and jaded friends in Leningrad to travel to a small provincial town near the White Sea. Ostensibly writing about provincial folk customs, but also hoping to gather material for an anti-Soviet satire, he instead meets Vera, a woman much older than he who has waited 30 years for her lover to return from World War II. Makine, whose previous novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers (1997), presents an elegantly enigmatic tale that explores a number of themes that may seem a little outdated to some readers but which meld seamlessly with the novel's mise-en-scene, including devotion, duty, and the contradiction between perception and truth. The latter is driven home by the complicated relationship between the narrator and Vera, and the brief moment when he all but morphs into her long-lost lover. Frank Caso Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Short stories contrive to use a single incident to illuminate a whole life: They aim for a short, sharp shock. Novels, those famously loose and baggy monsters, frequently transcribe entire biographies, reveal cross sections of society or show us the interaction of several generations: They contain multitudes. In between lies that most beautiful of fiction's forms, the novella or nouvelle. Here, the writer aims for the compression that produces both intensity and resonance. By focusing on just two or three characters, the short novel can achieve a kind of artistic perfection, elegant in form yet wide in implication. The closest analogue may be Aeschylean tragedy -- two actors on an almost bare stage, ripped by the torments of the human heart. Certainly this description matches Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited. In structure, polish and theme the novel may be likened to one of Turgenev's novellas -- think of The Torrents of Spring or First Love -- in which a middle-aged man suddenly recalls an episode from his youth. Unexpectedly overwhelmed by the vacuity of his life, no matter how filled with apparent success, he happens to unearth an old letter or a faded flower and with it come flooding back the memories of . . . what? He cannot quite say. Romantic illusions? Or perhaps the one chance for real happiness, now gone forever? As with other books by Russian-born, French-speaking Makine (such as the widely admired Dreams of My Russian Summers), The Woman Who Waited reads like a memoir. An unnamed Russian, now living in western Europe, thinks back to the mid- 1970s and that era when he was a feckless young man of 26. "It must have been during those September days . . . ." Back then he and his Leningrad friends, university-educated and hip, listen to American music, hope to be successful poets and painters, freely engage in casual sex at drunken parties. They have nothing but contempt for the Party, the bureaucratic apparatchiks, the older generation with its outmoded beliefs and morals. But after this young man accepts a research assignment to record vanishing folk beliefs, he suddenly finds himself at a settlement named Mirnoe. It's a nothing village populated mainly by old women in their eighties. Except for one, Vera. "She is a woman so intensely destined for happiness (if only purely physical happiness, mere bodily well-being), and yet she has chosen, almost casually, it seems, solitude, loyalty to an absent one, a refusal to love." So the narrator tells us in the first sentence of his reminiscence. He goes on to add that he wrote this down in his notebook "at that crucial moment when we believe we have sized up another person." That "believe" hints at the possibility of misjudgment, and on this hinges the novel's subsequent development. For our narrator is nothing if not a novelist in the making. Given any set of odd facts or circumstances, he begins to spin out plots and scenarios to fit. All too often, as he realizes much later, "we would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person." Vera's story is this: Back in 1945 she was 16, in love with a young man who was sent off to be a soldier. She promised to wait for him. He never came back, but she's still waiting, 30 years later. To those around her she stands as a being apart -- a saint who cares for decrepit widows, an example of fidelity that inspires awe even in lechers, a woman who has never betrayed her belief in true love. While the young girls in Leningrad are climbing out of their clothes at parties, Vera trudges through life