Review of The Woman Who Waited by Andreï Makine

An Arrogant Intellectual Meets His Match in This Passionate Novel

Aug 2, 2009

Makine explores the nature of women and the nature of language in this transcendent love story.

Andreï Makine is one of the most successful writers in Europe. Born in Siberia, he writes about Soviet Russia in French, utilising a handful of characters to reveal an entire nation. His work has received huge critical acclaim worldwide. In this story of love he explores how relationships move beyond the physical world to become spiritual experiences.

Mental life alone is shown as a kind of living death throughout the novel. The ‘Wigwam’ intellectual community of St Petersburg use rebellion against society as a way to evade responsibility, ‘reading[ing] out rah-rah-rah revolutionary poems and getting laid using exotic fruit-flavoured johnnies.’ (pg34)

There is no passion, no heart in their world, and it is ironic that the unnamed narrator leaves after seeing his girlfriend with another man. His emotions cut into his intellectual life, showing its hypocrisy. The reality of free love does not match the ideal.

When he moves to the village of Mirnoe (which literally means ‘peace’) he meets a woman whom he cannot fathom through thought alone. Like him, Vera is trapped in the intellectual world. For three decades she has remained faithful to the lover she had during the war, who promised to return but never did.

She is married to a memory of the relationship, an idea of it. It does not really matter whether or not he is alive; she is holding on to a relationship that is dead in her life. It is an understandable choice – the other male characters do not respect women, though Vera inspires respect in them. No man has been of a high enough quality to inspire her to move on.

Vera is very much associated with Goddess imagery. She is constantly linked with water, and like nature she is unchanging, living ‘a mode of survival not very different to the stone age’ (pg 41) When the reader first meets her, she is grappling with a fishing net. She works close to nature, and is a teacher who nurses the elderly and tends the graves of the dead – traditionally feminine activities that are not given the respect they deserve today.

Indeed, though narrator is employed to research the old stories that are dying with the old women, he does not tell them to the reader. His fascination with Vera takes over the text and he cannot satirise Soviet life as he intended to. Yet every time he tries to capture her by defining her with thoughts and words, she melts away, shifting shape like the Siberian snow.

Men often joke about not understanding women, but Vera’s inscrutability is intoxicating, leading this twenty-six year old man to question himself and finally grow up. This woman, who is old enough to be his Mother, makes a man of him. Vera is a spiritual experience that cannot be accessed by intellect alone. She represents the mystery of women and the mystery of life. Like Mother Russia, she is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Women have always been more associated with the natural, physical world, the most significant embodiment being Mother Earth, the centre of ancient Goddess spirituality. The central male deity was referred to as Father Sky.

Today, the character of God today is still thought of as living in the heavens above, whereas beneath human feet the nourishing Mother figure has taken on a more devilish character. In some faiths the male deity can seem a lonely, angry, remote figure, trapped in the sky in comparison to the physical lives of, for example, the Greek Gods and Goddesses on Mount Olympus.

The narrator is initially stuck in his intellectual high-ground, believing he is ‘erudition incarnate’ (pg 94) and assuming that Vera is stupid when in fact she studied for a doctorate in linguistic studies, something she did not find interesting enough to complete and now dismisses as ‘etymological humbug.’ Living in his mind prevents him from experiencing the truth of life around him.

Throughout the story he gradually opens to life. Although their eventual night together is uncertain, full of both ‘astonishing compassion’ (pg 158) and ‘a remoteness so complete’ (pg 157), the heaven-trapped Sky God opens up enough to finally be reunited with his earthly lover. When he leaves Mirnoe at the end of the novel, the ice breaks and both are free.

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