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. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Feb.)
