Brief Loves That Live Forever

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 “naïve 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. (Aug.)