Brief Loves That Live Forever
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A beautifully observed and moving account of love and the human spirit in the Soviet era
In Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him-a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover. As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom.
"Makine has been compared to Stendhal, Tolstoy and Proust; our best historians of the Soviet era queue up to pronounce him one of the finest living writers on the period; and he is regularly tipped to be among the contenders for the next Nobel in literature." -The Daily Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With writing that is as spare and evocative as poetry, Makine's (A Woman Loved) story is a gemstone of a novel, polished and luminous. The narrator, now in middle age, recounts stories of coming of age as an orphan during the deprivations of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union. He is drawn into the past by the memory of a man named Ress who, broken down by many years behind bars for political agitation, classifies his countrymen into three categories: the herd, "a docile mass"; the cynics, wrapped in irony; and the rebels, who are "na ve enough to hope." The narrator imagines another category of people, "those who have the wisdom to pause" and experience beauty. In his mind, these are the people who truly know how to live, and having only recently discovered this skill in himself, he searches his memories and finds those moments of tenderness and beauty that have stayed with him a secret message contained in a letter from a friend, a summer love at a beach resort on the Black Sea, an afternoon spent in an orchard in bloom under "the whipped cream of petals" with a woman who loves another man. All these fleeting moments are made more poignant by the fact that the Soviet world that formed these memories is itself lost. Far from simple nostalgia, this book is a meditation on love and loss Makine warns of the peril of an "obsession with what lasts," but with such beautiful writing in a slim volume, readers will want to linger.
