The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
With this novel, Andreï Makine, whose work has been compared to that of Balzac, Chekhov, Pasternak, and Proust, brings to a stunning conclusion his epic trilogy that began with Dreams of My Russian Summers and continued with Requiem for a Lost Empire.
The novel opens in 1942, in a burning, gutted Stalingrad, where the German and Russian armies are locked in a struggle to the death. Amid these ruins, a French pilot and a nurse, also French, are engaged in a passionate affair that each knows will be hopelessly brief. The pilot, Jacques Dorme, was shot down two years earlier. Imprisoned and sent east to a German POW camp, Dorme made a daring escape and crossed Germany stealthily by night until he arrived in an already devastated Russia, where, having proved his mettle as a pilot, he joined a Russian squadron stationed near Stalingrad. But during the brief time they have together there, the love between Dorme and Alexandra builds and blossoms into a relationship they both know comes but once in a lifetime.
Several decades later, the narrator—a Russian exiled in France, a war orphan haunted by his dark childhood and obsessively searching for his roots—travels back to his native land, where in the icy and treacherous wastelands of Siberia he attempts to discover how his life and that of Jacques Dorme are inextricably intertwined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Makine closes his epic 20th-century Russian trilogy (Dreams of My Russian Summers; Requiem for a Lost Empire) with a poignant, tender ode to the power of wartime love. Amid the ruins of Stalingrad in 1942, French fighter pilot Jacques Dorme engages in a brief but memorable affair with Alexandra, a nurse from his homeland. The tale of their doomed love is narrated by an unnamed, middle-aged protagonist, who is presumably the product of their affair. An account of Dorme's tragic story after escaping a German POW camp, he makes his way to Stalingrad, where he meets Alexandra, only to leave her and be killed on a heroic mission is interwoven with the narrator's memories of growing up in a Russian orphanage and his interactions with Alexandra as he writes a novel based on Dorme's life. Makine draws stark, dramatic parallels between the narrator's orphanage experience and Dorme's internment as a POW, shifting to a more elegiac, wistful tone as he describes the week Dorme and Alexandra spend together. In the haunting final chapters, the narrator meets Dorme's brother after journeying to the mountain where Dorme crashed and finding the wreckage of the overloaded supply plane he piloted on his last mission. This touching finale is a fitting conclusion to Makine's distinguished trilogy.
